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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000013- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
14 list.sort().
15
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000016- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
17 (2+3) --> (5).
18
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000019- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
20
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000021
22Extension Modules
23-----------------
24
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000025- array.array objects are now picklable.
26
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000027- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
28 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
29
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000030- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
31 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
32 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
33
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000034- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
35 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000036
37Library
38-------
39
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000040- Enhancements to the csv module:
41
42 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
43 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
44 PEP 305.
45 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
46 reporting.
47 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
48 dictates.
49 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000050 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000051 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000052 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
53 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000054 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
55 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +000056 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000057 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
58 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
59 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
60 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
61 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
62 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
63 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
64 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
65 without first creating a dialect class.
66 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
67 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
68 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +000069 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000070 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
71 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +000072 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
73 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
74 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
75 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000076 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
77 This has been fixed.
78
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +000079- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
80 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
81 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
82 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
83
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +000084- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
85
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +000086- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
87 (Bug #951915).
88
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +000089- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
90 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
91 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
92 encoding alias table
93
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +000094- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
95
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000096- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
97 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
98
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +000099- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
100
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000101- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
102
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000103- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
104
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000105- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
106
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000107- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
108
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000109- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
110 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
111 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
112
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000113- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000114 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000115
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000116- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
117 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
118 tokenizer with very long source lines.
119
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000120- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
121 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
122
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000123
124Build
125-----
126
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000127- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
128 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
129 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
130 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
131 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
132 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
133 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
134 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
135
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000136
137C API
138-----
139
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000140- Removed PyRange_New().
141
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000142
143Tests
144-----
145
146
147Mac
148---
149
150
151
152Tools/Demos
153-----------
154
155
156
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000157What's New in Python 2.4 final?
158===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000159
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000160*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000161
162Core and builtins
163-----------------
164
165- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
166 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
167 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
168
169
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000170What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
171==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000172
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000173*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000174
175Core and builtins
176-----------------
177
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000178- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
179 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
180 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
181
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000182
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000183Library
184-------
185
186- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
187 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
188 raised is re-raised.
189
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000190- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
191 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
192
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000193- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
194 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
195 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
196 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
197 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
198 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
199 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
200 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
201 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
202 by the slice are recomputed now.
203
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000204- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000205
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000206Build
207-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000208
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000209- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
210 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
211 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000212
213C API
214-----
215
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000216- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
217
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000218
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000219What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
220================================
221
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000222*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000223
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000224License
225-------
226
227The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
228is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
229changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
230Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
231intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
232durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
233the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
234License::
235
236 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
237
238says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
239to Python 2.1.1.
240
241The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
242License Version 2.
243
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000244Core and builtins
245-----------------
246
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000247- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
248 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
249 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
250 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
251 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
252 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
253 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
254 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
255 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
256 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
257
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000258- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000259
260Extension Modules
261-----------------
262
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000263- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
264 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
265 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
266 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000267
268Library
269-------
270
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000271- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
272 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
273 returned.
274
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000275- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
276
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000277- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
278 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
279
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000280- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
281
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000282- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
283 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000284
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000285- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
286
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000287- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
288
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000289- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000290 the source code is updated and reloaded.
291
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000292Build
293-----
294
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000295- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000296
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000297What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
298================================
299
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000300*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000301
302Core and builtins
303-----------------
304
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000305- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000306 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
307
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000308- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
309 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
310 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
311 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
312
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000313- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
314 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
315
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000316- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
317 constant.
318
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000319- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
320 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
321 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
322 large), and to anomalies such as
323 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
324 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
325 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
326 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000327
328Extension modules
329-----------------
330
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000331- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
332 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000333 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
334 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
335 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000336
337Library
338-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000339
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000340- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000341 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000342 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
343 --swig-cpp.
344
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000345- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
346 it is set.
347
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000348- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000349
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000350- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
351 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
352 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
353 Closes bug #1039270.
354
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000355- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000356
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000357 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000358 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
359 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
360 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
361 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
362 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
363 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
364 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
365 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
366 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
367 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
368 + Updates to documentation.
369
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000370- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
371 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
372 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
373 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
374
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000375- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000376
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000377- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
378 applications should use the getmember function.
379
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000380- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
381
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000382- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
383 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
384 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
385 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
386 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
387 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
388 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
389 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
390 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
391
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000392- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
393 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000394 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000395
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000396- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
397 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
398 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
399 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
400 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
401 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
402 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
403 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000404
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000405- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
406 the new public features (of which there are many).
407
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000408- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000409 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
410 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
411 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
412 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000413 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000414
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000415- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
416
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000417- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
418 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
419 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
420 options.
421
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000422- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
423 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
424 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
425 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
426 conditions under which non-string values work.
427
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000428Build
429-----
430
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000431- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
432 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
433 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
434
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000435- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
436 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
437 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
438 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
439 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000440
441C API
442-----
443
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000444- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
445 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
446
447- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
448
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000449- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
450 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
451 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
452 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
453 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
454 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
455 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
456 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
457 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
458
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000459- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
460
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000461- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
462 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
463 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000464
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000465Tests
466-----
467
468- test__locale ported to unittest
469
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000470Mac
471---
472
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000473- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
474 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
475 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000476
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000477Tools/Demos
478-----------
479
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000480- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
481 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
482 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
483 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
484 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000485
486
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000487What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
488=================================
489
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000490*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000491
492Core and builtins
493-----------------
494
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000495- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000496 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
497
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000498- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
499 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
500 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
501 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
502 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
503 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
504 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
505 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000506 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
507 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
508 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
509 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
510 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000511
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000512- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
513 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
514 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
515 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
516 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
517
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000518- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
519
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000520- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
521 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
522
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000523- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
524 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
525 modified the list.
526
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000527- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
528 functions is now writable.
529
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000530- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
531 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
532 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
533 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
534
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000535- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
536 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
537 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
538 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
539 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000540
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000541- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
542 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
543
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000544Extension modules
545-----------------
546
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000547- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
548
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000549- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
550 data.
551
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000552- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
553 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
554 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
555 supposed to have been truncated away.
556
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000557- Added socket.socketpair().
558
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000559- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
560 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
561
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000562- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000563 versions of Python, have now been removed.
564
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000565Library
566-------
567
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000568- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000569 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000570
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000571- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
572 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
573
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000574- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
575 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
576
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000577- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
578
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000579- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
580 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000581
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000582- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
583 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
584
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000585- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
586
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000587- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
588
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000589- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
590
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000591- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
592 Percivall.
593
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000594- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
595 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
596
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000597- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
598 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
599 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000600 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000601
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000602- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
603 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
604 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
605 and exponent.
606
607- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
608
609- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
610 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
611 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
612
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000613- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
614 to the readline module.
615
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000616- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000617 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
618 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000619
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000620- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
621 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
622 contains symlinks.
623
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000624- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
625 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
626
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000627- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
628 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
629 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
630
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000631- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
632 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
633 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
634 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
635 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
636 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
637 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
638 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
639 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
640 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
641 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
642 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
643 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
644
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000645- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
646
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000647Tools/Demos
648-----------
649
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000650- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
651 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
652
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000653- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
654
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000655Build
656-----
657
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000658- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
659 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
660 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
661 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
662 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
663 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
664 plans to do so.
665
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000666- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
667 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
668
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000669- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
670 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
671
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000672- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
673 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
674
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000675- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
676 GNU/k*BSD systems.
677
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000678- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
679 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
680
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000681C API
682-----
683
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000684..
685
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000686Documentation
687-------------
688
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000689- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
690 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
691
692- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
693 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
694 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000695
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000696New platforms
697-------------
698
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000699- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
700
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000701Tests
702-----
703
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000704..
705
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000706Windows
707-------
708
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000709- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
710 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
711 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
712 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
713 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
714 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
715 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
716 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
717 the problem.
718
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000719Mac
720---
721
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000722..
723
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000724
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000725What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
726=================================
727
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000728*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000729
730Core and builtins
731-----------------
732
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000733- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
734 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
735 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
736 sensitive code.
737
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000738- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000739 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000740
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000741 @staticmethod
742 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000743
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000744 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000745
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000746- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
747 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
748 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
749 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
750 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
751 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
752 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
753 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
754 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
755 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
756 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
757
758 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
759 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
760 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
761 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
762 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
763 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
764 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
765
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000766- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
767 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
768
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000769- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000770 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000771
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000772- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000773 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000774 which was missing for no apparent reason.
775
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000776- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000777 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
778 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
779
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000780- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
781 types that support garbage collection.
782
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000783- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
784
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000785- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
786 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
787 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
788 Jython.
789
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000790- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
791
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000792- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
793 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
794
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000795- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
796 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
797 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000798
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000799- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
800 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
801 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
802
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000803Extension modules
804-----------------
805
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000806- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
807
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000808Library
809-------
810
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000811- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
812 TIS-620
813
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000814- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
815 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
816 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
817 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
818 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
819 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
820 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
821 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
822 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
823 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
824
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000825- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
826
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000827- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
828 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
829 same as when the argument is omitted).
830 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
831
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000832- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
833
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000834- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
835 schemes are offered.
836
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000837- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
838
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000839- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
840 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
841 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
842
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000843- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
844
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000845- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
846 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
847
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000848- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
849 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
850 when dummy_threading is being used.
851
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000852- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
853 from a tarfile.
854
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000855- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000856 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000857
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000858- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
859 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
860 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
861 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
862
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000863- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
864 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
865
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000866- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
867 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
868 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
869 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
870 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
871 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
872 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
873 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
874 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
875 by some other method in progress).
876
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000877- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
878 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
879 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000880
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000881- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
882
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000883- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
884 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
885 AM Kuchling.
886
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000887- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
888 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
889 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
890
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000891- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
892 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
893 instead of unsigned.
894
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000895- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000896 no longer part of the public API.
897
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000898- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
899 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
900 string methods of the same name).
901
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000902- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000903 SF patch 945642.
904
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000905- doctest unittest integration improvements:
906
907 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
908
909 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
910 DocTestSuites.
911
912- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
913 that provide thread-local data.
914
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000915- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
916 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
917
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000918- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
919
920- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
921 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
922 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
923
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000924- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
925
926 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
927 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
928 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000929
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000930 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
931 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
932 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
933 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
934
935 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
936 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
937
938 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
939 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
940 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
941 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
942
943 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
944 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
945 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
946 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
947 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
948
949 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
950 wrapping help output.
951
952 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
953 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
954 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000955
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000956C API
957-----
958
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000959- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
960 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
961 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
962 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
963 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
964 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
965 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
966 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
967 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
968 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
969 its visible semantics have not changed.
970
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000971- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
972 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
973
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000974Documentation
975-------------
976
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000977- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000978
979 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000980 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000981
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000982 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000983
984 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
985
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000986- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000987
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000988Tests
989-----
990
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000991- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000992 platforms that use the Makefile.
993
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000994- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
995 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
996 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
997
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000998
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000999What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1000=================================
1001
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001002*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001003
1004Core and builtins
1005-----------------
1006
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001007- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1008 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1009 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1010 objects now (one object instead of three).
1011
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001012- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1013 Windows DLLs.
1014
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001015- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1016 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001017
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001018- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1019 a new .pyc magic.
1020
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001021- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1022 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1023 be there.
1024
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001025- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1026 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1027 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1028
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001029- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1030 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1031 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1032
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001033- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1034
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001035- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1036 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1037 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001038
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001039- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1040 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1041
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001042- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1043
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001044- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001045 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001046
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001047- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1048
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001049- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1050
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001051- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1052 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1053
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001054- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1055 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1056 Fixes bug #858016 .
1057
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001058- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1059 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1060 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1061
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001062- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1063 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1064 improves their performance (about 35%).
1065
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001066- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1067 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1068 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1069
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001070- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1071 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1072 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1073 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1074
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001075- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1076 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1077 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1078 length is not known).
1079
1080- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1081 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001082 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1083 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001084 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1085
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001086- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1087 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1088
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001089- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1090 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1091 keyword arguments.
1092
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001093- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1094 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1095 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1096
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001097- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1098 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1099 cases.
1100
1101- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1102 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1103 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1104 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1105 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1106 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1107 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1108 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1109 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1110 a release build.
1111
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001112- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1113 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1114
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001115- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001116 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001117
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001118- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1119 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1120 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1121 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1122 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1123 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1124 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1125 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1126 destroyed.
1127
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001128- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1129 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1130 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1131 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1132 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1133 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1134 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1135 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1136
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001137- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1138 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1139 character other than a space.
1140
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001141- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1142 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1143 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1144 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1145 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1146 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1147 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1148 attributes with the same name.
1149
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001150- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1151 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1152 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1153 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1154 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1155 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1156 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1157 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1158 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1159 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1160 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1161 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1162 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1163 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001164
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001165- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1166 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1167 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1168 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1169 This has been repaired.
1170
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001171- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1172
1173- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1174
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001175- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1176 over a sequence.
1177
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001178- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001179 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001180
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001181- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1182
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001183- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1184 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1185 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1186 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1187 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1188 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1189 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1190 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1191
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001192- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1193 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1194 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1195
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001196- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1197 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1198 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1199 freelist.
1200
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001201- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1202 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1203
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001204- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1205 number.
1206
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001207- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1208 a TypeError exception.
1209
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001210- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1211 820195.
1212
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001213- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1214 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1215 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1216
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001217- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001218 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1219 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001220
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001221- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1222 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1223 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1224
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001225- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1226 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001227 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001228
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001229- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001230 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1231 the first call.
1232
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001233
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001234Extension modules
1235-----------------
1236
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001237- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1238 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1239
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001240- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1241 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1242 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1243 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1244 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1245 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1246 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001247
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001248- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1249
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001250- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1251
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001252- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1253 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1254
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001255- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1256 fewer false positives.
1257
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001258- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1259 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1260
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001261- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001262 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1263
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001264- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001265 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001266 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001267 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1268 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001269
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001270- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1271 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1272 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1273 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1274
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001275- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1276 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1277 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1278 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1279 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1280 #897625.
1281
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001282- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1283 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1284
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001285- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1286 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1287 and pops on either side of the deque.
1288
1289- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1290 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1291
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001292- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1293 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1294 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1295 other functions that expect a function argument.
1296
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001297- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1298
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001299- os.getsid was added.
1300
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001301- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1302 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1303 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1304
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001305- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1306
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001307- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1308
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001309- readline.clear_history was added.
1310
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001311- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1312
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001313- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1314
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001315- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1316
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001317- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1318
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001319- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1320
1321- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1322
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001323- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1324
1325- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1326
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001327- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1328 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1329 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1330
1331- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1332 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1333 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1334 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1335 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1336 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1337 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1338
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001339- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1340 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1341 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1342 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001343
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001344- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001345 iterators from a single iterable.
1346
1347- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1348 of raising a TypeError exception.
1349
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001350- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1351 as parameter.
1352
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001353Library
1354-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001355
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001356- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1357 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1358 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001359
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001360- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1361 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1362 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001363
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001364- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001365
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001366- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1367 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001368
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001369- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1370 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1371
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001372- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1373
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001374- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001375 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001376
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001377- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001378 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001379
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001380- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1381
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001382- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1383 on cygwin and mingw32.
1384
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001385- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1386
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001387- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1388 module.
1389
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001390- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1391 installation scheme for all platforms.
1392
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001393- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001394 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001395
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001396- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1397 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1398 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1399
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001400- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1401 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1402 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1403
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001404- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1405
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001406- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1407
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001408- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1409 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1410
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001411- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1412 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1413 type pattern with the same value exists.
1414
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001415- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1416 when run from the command prompt).
1417
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001418- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1419 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1420
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001421- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1422 default sort).
1423
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001424- Added global runctx function to profile module
1425
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001426- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1427
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001428- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1429
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001430- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1431
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001432- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001433 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1434 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1435 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1436 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1437 accordingly.
1438
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001439- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1440 decoding standards.
1441
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001442- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1443 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1444 called for all requests.
1445
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001446- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1447 they are passed to the compiler.
1448
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001449- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1450 indent, width and depth.
1451
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001452- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1453 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1454
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001455- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1456 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1457
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001458- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1459
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001460- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1461
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001462- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1463
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001464- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1465 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1466
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001467- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001468 for better performance.
1469
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001470- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001471
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001472- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1473 a string).
1474
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001475- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1476
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001477- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1478
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001479- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1480
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001481- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1482
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001483- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1484 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1485 list of fieldnames.
1486
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001487- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1488 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1489
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001490- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1491
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001492- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1493 empty lists.
1494
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001495- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1496 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1497 and shelves.
1498
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001499- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1500 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1501
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001502- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001503 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1504 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001505
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001506- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1507 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001508 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001509
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001510- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001511 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1512 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1513
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001514- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1515 and removed in Py2.4.
1516
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001517- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1518
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001519- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1520
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001521Tools/Demos
1522-----------
1523
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001524- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1525 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1526
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001527- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1528
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001529- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1530 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1531 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1532 destination in situations where both files are given.
1533
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001534- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1535 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1536 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1537 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1538
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001539- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1540
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001541- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1542 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1543 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1544 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1545 now.
1546
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001547- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1548 in effect
1549
1550- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1551 C-c C-h
1552
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001553- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1554 -d option was given.
1555
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001556Build
1557-----
1558
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001559- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1560 build under OS X.
1561
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001562- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1563 --enable-profiling.
1564
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001565- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1566 is configured --with-tsc.
1567
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001568- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1569 on AMD64.
1570
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001571- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1572 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1573
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001574- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1575 removed.
1576
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001577- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1578 supported (see PEP 11).
1579
1580- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1581
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001582- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1583
1584- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1585 (see PEP 11).
1586
1587- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1588 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1589
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001590C API
1591-----
1592
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001593- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1594 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1595 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1596
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001597- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1598 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1599 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1600 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1601
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001602- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1603 generator objects.
1604
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001605- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1606 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001607 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1608 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001609
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001610- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1611 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1612
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001613- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1614 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1615 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1616 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1617 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1618
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001619- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1620 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1621 about 10% faster.
1622
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001623- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1624 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1625
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001626- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1627 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1628 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1629 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1630
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001631Windows
1632-------
1633
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001634- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1635 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1636 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1637 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1638
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001639- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1640 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1641 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1642
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001643
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001644What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1645===============================
1646
1647*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1648
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001649IDLE
1650----
1651
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001652- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1653 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1654 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1655 context-menu actions.
1656
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001657- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1658 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1659 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1660 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1661 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1662 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1663 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1664 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1665 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1666
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001667
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001668What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1669=============================================
1670
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001671*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001672
1673Core and builtins
1674-----------------
1675
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001676- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001677 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001678 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1679
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001680Extension modules
1681-----------------
1682
1683- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1684 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1685 than once. This has been fixed.
1686
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001687- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1688 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1689 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1690 call.
1691
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001692- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1693
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001694Library
1695-------
1696
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001697- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1698 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1699
1700- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1701 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1702 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1703 restored.
1704
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001705IDLE
1706----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001707
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001708- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001709
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001710Build
1711-----
1712
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001713- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1714 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1715
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001716C API
1717-----
1718
1719Windows
1720-------
1721
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001722- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1723 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1724
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001725- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1726
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001727Mac
1728---
1729
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001730- Various fixes to pimp.
1731
1732- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1733
1734- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1735 more problems than it solves.
1736
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001737
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001738What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1739=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001740
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001741*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1742
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001743Core and builtins
1744-----------------
1745
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001746- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1747 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1748
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001749- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1750 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001751 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001752
1753- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1754 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1755 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001756 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001757
1758- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1759 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001760
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001761- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1762 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1763 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1764
1765- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001766 770247.
1767
1768- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001769
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001770Extension modules
1771-----------------
1772
1773- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1774 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1775
1776- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1777
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001778- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1779
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001780- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1781 contained within the _strptime module.
1782
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001783- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1784 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1785
1786- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001787 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1788
1789- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1790 the find_class attribute, if present.
1791
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001792- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001793
1794 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1795 (SF bug 763298).
1796
1797 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001798 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1799 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1800 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001801
1802 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1803
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001804Library
1805-------
1806
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001807- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1808
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001809- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1810 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1811 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1812 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1813 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1814 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1815 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1816 or Tester().
1817
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001818- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1819 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1820 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1821 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1822 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1823 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1824 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1825 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1826 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001827
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001828 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001829
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001830- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1831 weren't before was an oversight.
1832
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001833- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1834 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1835
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001836- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1837 when there are no lines.
1838
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001839- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1840 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1841
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001842- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1843 to child processes.
1844
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001845- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1846
1847- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1848
1849- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1850 xmlrpclib.
1851
1852- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1853 responses.
1854
1855- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1856 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1857
1858- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1859 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1860 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1861
1862- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1863 used as patterns.
1864
1865- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1866 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1867 than Tk 8.3.
1868
1869- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1870
1871- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001872
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001873Tools/Demos
1874-----------
1875
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001876- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1877
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001878- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1879
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001880- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001881
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001882Build
1883-----
1884
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001885- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1886
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001887- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1888
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001889- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1890 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001891
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001892- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1893 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1894 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001895
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001896C API
1897-----
1898
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001899- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1900 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1901
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001902Windows
1903-------
1904
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001905- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1906 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1907 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1908 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1909 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1910 Python exception ::
1911
1912 thread.error: can't start new thread
1913
1914 is raised now.
1915
1916- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1917 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1918 instead of from DLL teardown.
1919
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001920Mac
1921---
1922
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001923- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001924 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001925 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1926 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1927 the executable in the bundle.
1928
1929- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001930
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001931- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1932
1933- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1934 on Panther.
1935
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001936What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1937================================
1938
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001939*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001940
1941Core and builtins
1942-----------------
1943
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001944- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1945 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1946 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1947 with the -i option.
1948
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001949- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1950 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1951
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001952- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1953 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1954
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001955- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1956 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1957 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1958 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1959 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1960 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1961 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1962 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1963 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1964 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1965 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1966 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1967 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001968
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001969- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1970 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1971 embedded in a lambda expression.
1972
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001973- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1974 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1975 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1976 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1977 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1978
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001979- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1980 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1981 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1982
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001983- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1984 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1985
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001986- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1987 It's writable again.
1988
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001989- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1990 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1991 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001992 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001993
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001994- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1995 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1996 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1997
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001998Extension modules
1999-----------------
2000
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002001- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2002 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2003
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002004- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2005 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2006 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2007 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2008
2009- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2010 collection.
2011
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002012- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2013 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2014 unique within a single program run.
2015
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002016- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2017 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2018
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002019- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2020 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2021
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002022- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2023 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002024
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002025- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2026
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002027- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2028 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2029
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002030- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2031 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2032 for many BSD-derived systems.
2033
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002034
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002035Library
2036-------
2037
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002038- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2039 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2040 primary ones:
2041
2042 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2043 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2044 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2045
2046 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2047 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2048 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2049 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2050 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2051 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2052
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002053- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2054 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2055 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2056 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2057 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2058 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2059 argument.
2060
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002061- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2062 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2063 in the archive.
2064
2065- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2066 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2067
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002068- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2069 569574).
2070
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002071- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2072 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2073 no more.
2074
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002075- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2076 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2077 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2078 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2079 code coverage.
2080
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002081- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2082 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2083 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002084 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2085 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002086
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002087- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2088 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2089 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002090 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002091
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002092- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2093
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002094- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2095 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2096 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2097 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2098
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002099- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2100 handling.
2101
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002102- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2103 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2104
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002105- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2106 in socket.py.
2107
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002108- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2109
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002110- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2111 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2112 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2113 opener with proxy support.
2114
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002115- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2116
2117- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2118
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002119Tools/Demos
2120-----------
2121
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002122- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2123
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002124- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2125
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002126- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2127 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002128
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002129- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2130 files.
2131
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002132Build
2133-----
2134
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002135- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002136 different root directory.
2137
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002138C API
2139-----
2140
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002141- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2142 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2143 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2144 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2145 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2146 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2147 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2148 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2149 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2150 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2151
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002152- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2153 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2154 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2155 from Python.
2156
2157
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002158New platforms
2159-------------
2160
2161None this time.
2162
2163Tests
2164-----
2165
2166- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2167 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2168
2169Windows
2170-------
2171
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002172- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2173
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002174- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2175 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2176 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2177 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2178 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2179 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2180 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2181 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2182 that's what it's for.
2183
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002184Mac
2185---
2186
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002187- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2188 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2189 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2190 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002191- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2192 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2193- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002194
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002195SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2196------------------------------------
2197
2198430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2199598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2200622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2201661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2202683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2203697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2204713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2205724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2206727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2207729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2208730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2209731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2210732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2211733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2212735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2213740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2214744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2215745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2216747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2217749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2218751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2219753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2220755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2221757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2222760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2223
2224
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002225What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2226================================
2227
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002228*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002229
2230Core and builtins
2231-----------------
2232
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002233- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2234 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2235
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002236- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2237 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2238 and cannot be strings).
2239
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002240- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2241 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2242 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2243 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2244
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002245- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2246 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2247 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2248 Python itself.
2249
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002250- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2251 the referenced object, if it has one.
2252
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002253- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2254 the thread started at
2255 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2256
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002257- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2258 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2259 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2260 placed on a list index.
2261
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002262- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2263 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2264 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2265 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2266
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002267- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2268 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2269 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2270 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2271 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2272 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2273 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2274
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002275- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2276 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2277 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2278 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2279 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2280
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002281- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2282 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002283
2284- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2285 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2286 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2287 #693195.)
2288
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002289- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2290 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002291
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002292- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002293 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002294 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2295 interpreter executions, would fail.
2296
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002297- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002298 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002299 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002300
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002301Extension modules
2302-----------------
2303
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002304- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2305 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2306 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2307 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2308
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002309- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2310 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2311
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002312- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2313 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2314 and Greg Chapman.)
2315
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002316- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2317 recursively.
2318
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002319- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002320 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2321 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2322 leaks.
2323
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002324- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2325
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002326- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2327 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2328 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2329 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2330 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2331 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2332 #705836.
2333
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002334- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002335 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2336
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002337- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2338 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2339 See SF bug #692416.
2340
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002341- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2342 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2343
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002344- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2345 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2346 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002347
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002348- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002349 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2350 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2351
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002352- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2353 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2354 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2355 timeouts to work properly.
2356
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002357Library
2358-------
2359
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002360- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2361 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2362 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2363 future release.
2364
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002365- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2366 for querying platform dependent features.
2367
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002368- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002369
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002370- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2371 pickle protocol versions.
2372
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002373- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2374 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2375 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2376
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002377- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2378
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002379- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2380 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2381 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2382 modules.
2383
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002384- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2385 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2386 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2387
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002388- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2389 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2390
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002391- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2392 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2393 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2394
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002395- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002396 MS Office extensions.
2397
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002398- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2399 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2400
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002401- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2402 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2403
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002404- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2405 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2406 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2407 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2408 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2409 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2410
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002411- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2412 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2413 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002414
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002415- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2416 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2417 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2418
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002419- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2420
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002421- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2422 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2423 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2424
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002425Tools/Demos
2426-----------
2427
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002428- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2429 See the module docstring for details.
2430
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002431Build
2432-----
2433
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002434- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2435 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002436
2437C API
2438-----
2439
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002440- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2441
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002442- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2443 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2444 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2445
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002446- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2447 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002448
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002449 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2450 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2451 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002452
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002453- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002454 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2455
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002456- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2457 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2458 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002459
2460New platforms
2461-------------
2462
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002463None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002464
2465Tests
2466-----
2467
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002468- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2469 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002470
2471Windows
2472-------
2473
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002474- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2475 function.
2476
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002477- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2478 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002479
2480Mac
2481---
2482
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002483- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2484 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002485
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002486- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2487 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002488
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002489- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2490 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2491 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002492
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002493- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002494 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2495 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002496
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002497- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2498 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002499
2500
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002501What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2502=================================
2503
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002504*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002505
2506Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002507-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002508
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002509- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2510 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2511 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2512
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002513- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2514 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2515 (SF patch #664376.)
2516
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002517- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2518 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2519 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2520 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2521 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2522 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002523 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002524
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002525- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2526 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2527 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2528 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002529 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002530
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002531- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2532 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2533 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2534 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2535 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2536 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2537 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2538 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2539 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2540 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2541 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2542
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002543- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2544 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2545 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2546 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2547 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2548 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2549
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002550- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2551 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2552
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002553- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2554 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2555 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2556 case.)
2557
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002558- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2559 passed as unicode strings.
2560
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002561- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2562 See SF bug #683467.
2563
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002564- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2565 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2566
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002567- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2568
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002569- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2570
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002571- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2572 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2573 arguments.
2574
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002575- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2576 See SF bug #667147.
2577
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002578- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002579 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002580 See SF bug #676155.
2581
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002582- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002583 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002584 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2585 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2586 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2587 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2588 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2589 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002590
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002591Extension modules
2592-----------------
2593
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002594- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2595 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2596 tp_as_number pointer.
2597
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002598- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2599 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2600 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2601 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2602 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2603
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002604- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2605
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002606- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2607
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002608- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002609 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002610 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2611 patch #678531.)
2612
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002613- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2614 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2615
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002616- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2617 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2618
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002619- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2620
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002621- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2622 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2623 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2624
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002625- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2626
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002627- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2628 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2629
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002630- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002631
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002632- datetime changes:
2633
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002634 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2635
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002636 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2637 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2638 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2639 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2640 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2641 now.
2642
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002643 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002644 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2645 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002646
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002647 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002648 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002649 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2650 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2651 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2652 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002653
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002654 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2655 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2656 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002657 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2658
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002659 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2660 by a later example coded by Guido.
2661
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002662 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002663 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2664 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2665 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002666 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2667 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2668
2669 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2670 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2671 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2672 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2673 tzinfo subclass instance.
2674
2675 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2676 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2677 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2678 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2679 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2680 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2681 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2682 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002683
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002684 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2685 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2686 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2687 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2688 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002689 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2690
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002691 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002692
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002693 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2694 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2695 as a naive datetime object.
2696
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002697 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2698 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2699 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2700
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002701 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2702 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2703 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2704 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2705 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2706 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2707 comparison.
2708
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002709 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2710 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2711 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2712 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002713 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002714
2715 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002716
2717 and ::
2718
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002719 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2720
2721 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2722 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2723 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2724 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2725
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002726 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2727 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2728 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2729 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2730 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2731
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002732 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2733 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002734 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2735 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002736
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002737Library
2738-------
2739
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002740- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2741 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2742
2743- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2744 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2745 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2746 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2747 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2748 See PEP 307 for details.
2749
2750- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2751 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2752
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002753- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2754 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002755 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002756 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2757 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002758 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002759
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002760- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2761 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2762
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002763- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2764 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2765 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2766
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002767- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2768
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002769- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2770 exception.
2771
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002772- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2773 class.
2774
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002775- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2776 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2777 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2778
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002779- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2780 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2781
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002782- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002783 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2784 See SF bug #659228.
2785
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002786- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2787 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2788 See SF patch #651082.
2789
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002790- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002791
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002792- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2793 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2794
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002795- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002796 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002797
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002798- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2799 DOS paths from other platforms.
2800
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002801Tools/Demos
2802-----------
2803
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002804- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2805 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2806 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2807 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2808 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2809 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2810 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2811 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2812 example:
2813
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002814 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2815 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002816
2817 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2818
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002819
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002820Build
2821-----
2822
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002823- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2824 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2825 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002826 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2827
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002828 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2829
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002830- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2831 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2832 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2833 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2834 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2835 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2836 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2837 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2838 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2839
2840- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2841 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2842 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2843 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2844
2845- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2846 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2847
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002848C API
2849-----
2850
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002851- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2852 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002853
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002854- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2855 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2856 tp_as_number pointer.
2857
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002858- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2859 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2860 (SF #681367)
2861
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002862- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2863 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2864 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2865 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002866
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002867Tests
2868-----
2869
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002870- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002871 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2872 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2873 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2874 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2875 pydoc.)
2876
2877- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2878
2879- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002880
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002881Windows
2882-------
2883
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002884- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2885 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2886 time).
2887
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002888- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2889 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2890
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002891- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2892 release without strong cryptography.
2893
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002894- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002895 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002896
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002897- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2898 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2899
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002900Mac
2901---
2902
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002903- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2904 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002905
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002906- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2907 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2908 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002909
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002910- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2911 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002912
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002913- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2914 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2915 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2916 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002917
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002918- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002919 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2920 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2921 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002922
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002923
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002924What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002925=================================
2926
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002927*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002928
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002929Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002930--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002931
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002932- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2933
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002934- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2935 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002936 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002937 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002938 a different meaning than before.
2939
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002940- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002941 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002942 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002943
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002944- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002945 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002946 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002947
2948- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2949 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2950 and deallocation.
2951
2952- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2953 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2954
2955- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2956 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2957 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2958 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2959 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2960
2961- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2962 now detected by the garbage collector.
2963
2964- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2965 [SF bug 519621]
2966
2967- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2968 identifier.
2969
2970- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2971 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2972 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2973 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2974 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2975 [SF bug 563060]
2976
2977- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2978 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2979 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2980 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2981 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2982
2983- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2984 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2985 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2986
2987- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2988
2989- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2990 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2991 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2992 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2993 state of the slots would be lost.)
2994
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002995Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002996-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002997
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002998- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002999 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3000 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3001 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3002 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003003 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3004 Jython 2.1.
3005
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003006- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003007 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003008 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3009 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3010 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3011 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3012 these, see PEP 302.
3013
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003014- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3015 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3016 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3017
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003018- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3019 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3020 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3021
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003022- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3023 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3024 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3025
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003026- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3027 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3028 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3029 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3030 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3031 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3032 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3033 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3034 releases or implementations.
3035
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003036- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003037 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3038 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003039
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003040- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3041 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3042
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003043- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3044 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3045 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3046
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003047- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3048 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3049
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003050- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3051 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003052 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3053 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003054
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003055- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3056 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3057 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3058 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3059 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3060
3061 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3062 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3063 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3064 pattern.
3065
3066 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3067 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3068 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3069 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3070
3071 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3072 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3073 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3074 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3075 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3076 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3077
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003078- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3079 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3080 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3081 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3082 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3083 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3084 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3085 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003086
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003087- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3088 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3089 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3090 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3091 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003092 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3093 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3094 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3095 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3096 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3097 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3098 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003099
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003100- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3101 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3102
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003103- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3104 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3105 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3106 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3107 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3108 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3109 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3110 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3111 to Zack Weinberg!
3112
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003113- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3114 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3115 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3116 type. This has been fixed now.
3117
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003118- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3119 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3120 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3121
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003122- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3123 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3124 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3125 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3126 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3127 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3128 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3129 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003130 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003131
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003132- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3133 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3134 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003135
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003136- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3137 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3138 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3139 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3140 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3141 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3142 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3143 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003144 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003145 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3146 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3147
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003148- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3149 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3150 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3151 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3152 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3153 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3154 this.)
3155
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003156- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3157 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003158 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003159 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003160 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3161 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003162 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3163 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003164
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003165- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3166 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3167 currently running.
3168
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003169- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3170 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3171 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3172 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3173
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003174- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3175 as directory names.
3176
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003177- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3178 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3179
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003180- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3181 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3182
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003183- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003184 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3185 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003186
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003187- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3188 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3189 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3190 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3191 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3192
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003193- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3194 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3195 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3196 removed.
3197
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003198- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3199 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3200 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3201
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003202- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3203 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3204 to __debug__.
3205
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003206- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3207 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3208 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3209
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003210- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3211 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3212 deprecated now.
3213
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003214- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3215 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3216 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003217
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003218- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3219 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3220 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3221 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3222 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003223
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003224- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3225 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3226
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003227- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3228 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3229 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003230 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003231 is backward compatible.
3232
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003233- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3234 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3235 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3236 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3237 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3238
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003239- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3240 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3241 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3242 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3243 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3244 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003245
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003246- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3247 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3248
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003249- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3250 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3251
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003252- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3253 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3254 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3255 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3256 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3257
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003258- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3259 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3260 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3261
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003262- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003263 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3264
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003265- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3266 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3267 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003268
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003269- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3270 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3271
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003272- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3273 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3274 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3275
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003276- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3277
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003278Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003279-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003280
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003281- Added three operators to the operator module:
3282 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3283 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3284 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3285
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003286- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3287
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003288- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3289 archives.
3290
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003291- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3292 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3293 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3294
3295 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3296
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003297- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3298 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3299 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003300 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003301
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003302- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3303 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3304 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3305 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003306 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3307 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3308 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3309 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003310
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003311- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3312 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003313
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003314- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3315
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003316- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3317 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3318
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003319- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3320 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3321 supported.
3322
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003323- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3324
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003325- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3326 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003327
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003328- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3329 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3330
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003331- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3332
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003333- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3334 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3335
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003336- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3337 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3338 functions but callable type objects.
3339
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003340- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003341 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003342 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003343
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003344- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3345 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003346
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003347- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3348 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003349
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003350- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3351 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3352 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3353 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3354
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003355- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3356 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003357
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003358- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3359 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3360 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3361 and __imul__.
3362
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003363- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003364 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3365 is called.
3366
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003367- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3368 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3369 interpreter was compiled.
3370
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003371- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3372 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3373 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003374 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003375 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3376 1, not 2.
3377
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003378- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3379 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3380 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3381 limit.
3382
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003383- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3384 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3385 bug #623464.
3386
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003387- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3388 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3389 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3390 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3391
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003392Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003393-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003394
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003395- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3396
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003397- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3398 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3399 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3400 with Python 2.3a2.
3401
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003402- os.path exposes getctime.
3403
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003404- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003405 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003406 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003407 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003408 unit tests of floating point results.
3409
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003410- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3411 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3412 has been increased.
3413
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003414- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3415 executed.
3416
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003417- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3418 postinstallation script.
3419
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003420- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3421 test the current module.
3422
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003423- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003424 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3425 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3426 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3427 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3428
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003429- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003430 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003431 Ward's Optik package.
3432
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003433- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3434 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3435 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3436 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3437
3438- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3439 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003440 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003441
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003442- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3443 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3444 shelf are binary pickles.
3445
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003446- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3447 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3448
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003449- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3450 modules are iterators now.
3451
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003452- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3453 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3454 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3455 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3456 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3457 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003458
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003459- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3460 with their entity value.
3461
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003462- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3463
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003464- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3465 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003466
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003467- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3468 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003469 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003470
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003471- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3472 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3473 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3474 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3475 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3476 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3477 main():
3478
3479 import locale
3480 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3481
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003482- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3483 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3484
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003485- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3486 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3487 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3488 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3489 to the new standard.
3490
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003491- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3492 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3493 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3494 an extension to the database.
3495
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003496- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3497 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3498 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3499 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003500 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003501
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003502- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003503 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003504
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003505- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3506 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3507 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3508 bounded integers.
3509
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003510- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3511 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3512 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3513 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3514 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3515 in existence.
3516
3517 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3518 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3519 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3520 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3521 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3522 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3523
3524 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3525 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3526 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3527 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3528
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003529- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3530 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3531 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3532
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003533- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3534
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003535- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3536 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3537 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3538 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3539
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003540- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3541 argument.
3542
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003543- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3544 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3545 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3546 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3547 [SF patch 560794].
3548
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003549- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3550 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3551 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003552 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3553 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3554 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003555
3556- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3557 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003558
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003559- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3560 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3561 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3562 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003563
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003564- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3565 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3566 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3567 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3568 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3569
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003570- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003571
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003572- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3573
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003574- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3575 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3576 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3577 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3578 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3579 identical to None.
3580
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003581- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3582 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3583 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3584 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3585 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3586 results now.
3587
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003588- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3589 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3590
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003591- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3592 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3593 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3594 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3595 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3596 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3597 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3598 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3599
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003600- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3601
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003602- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3603 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3604
3605- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3606 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3607 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3608 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3609 and other systems.
3610
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003611- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3612 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3613 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3614 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 +00003615 work well with these.
3616
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003617- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3618
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003619- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003620 connections.
3621
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003622- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3623 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3624 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3625
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003626- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3627 sets
3628
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003629- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3630 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3631 name.
3632
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003633- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3634 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3635 passed in.
3636
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003637- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003638 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003639 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3640 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003641
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003642- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3643
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003644- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3645
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003646- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3647 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3648 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3649
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003650- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3651 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3652 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3653 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003654 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003655
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003656- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003657 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003658 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003659
3660- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3661 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3662 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3663
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003664- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003665 the value of its expression argument.
3666
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003667- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3668 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3669 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3670
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003671- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3672 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3673 skipstone browser was included.
3674
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003675- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3676 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3677
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003678Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003679-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003680
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003681- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3682 names in addition to accepting file names.
3683
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003684- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3685 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3686 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3687 still used and useful.)
3688
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003689- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3690 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3691 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3692 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003693
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003694- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3695 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3696 the generated binary.
3697
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003698Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003699-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003700
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003701- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3702
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003703- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3704 except in the hands of experts.
3705
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003706- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003707 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3708 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3709 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003710
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003711- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3712 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3713 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3714 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3715 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3716 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3717 builds.
3718
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003719- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3720 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3721 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3722 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3723 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3724 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3725 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3726 new type.
3727
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003728- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003729
3730 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3731 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3732 positive infinities.
3733
3734 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3735 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3736 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3737 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3738 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3739 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3740 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3741
3742 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3743
3744 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3745
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003746- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3747 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3748 size of the executable.
3749
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003750- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3751 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3752 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3753 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003754
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003755- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3756
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003757- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3758 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3759 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003760
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003761- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3762 well as Unix.
3763
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003764- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3765 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3766 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3767 modules in the README file for details.
3768
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003769C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003770-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003771
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003772- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3773 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003774 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003775 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003776 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003777
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003778- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3779 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3780 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3781 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3782 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3783 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003784 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003785 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3786 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3787 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3788 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3789 aligned.)
3790
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003791- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3792 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3793 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3794
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003795- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3796 level.
3797
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003798- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3799 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3800 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3801 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3802 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3803
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003804- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3805 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3806 code.
3807
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003808- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3809 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3810 adjusting for negative indices.
3811
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003812- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3813 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3814 object.
3815
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003816- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3817 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3818 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3819
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003820- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3821 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003822
3823- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3824
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003825- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3826 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3827 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3828 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3829
3830- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3831
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003832- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003833
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003834- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003835 without going through the buffer API.
3836
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003837- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003838
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003839- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3840 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3841 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3842 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3843
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003844- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3845 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3846
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003847- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003848 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3849
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003850New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003851-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003852
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003853- OpenVMS is now supported.
3854
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003855- AtheOS is now supported.
3856
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003857- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3858
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003859- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3860
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003861Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003862-----
3863
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003864- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3865 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3866 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003867
3868Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003869-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003870
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003871- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3872 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3873 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3874 bugs.
3875 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003876 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003877 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3878 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003879 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003880
3881- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003882 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003883
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003884- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3885 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3886
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003887- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3888 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003889 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003890 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3891
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003892- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3893 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3894 use files" uninstall option).
3895
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003896- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3897
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003898- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3899 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3900
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003901- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3902 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3903 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3904
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003905- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3906 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3907 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3908 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3909 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003910 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3911 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3912 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003913
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003914- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003915 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003916 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3917 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3918 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3919 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3920 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3921 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3922 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3923 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3924 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3925 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3926 work around.
3927
3928- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3929 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3930 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3931 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3932 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3933 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3934 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3935 specified with O_CREAT too).
3936
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003937Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003938----
3939
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003940- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003941
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003942- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3943 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3944 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3945
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003946- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3947 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3948 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3949
3950- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3951 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3952 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3953 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3954 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3955 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3956 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3957 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003958
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003959- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3960 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3961 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003962
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003963- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3964 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3965 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3966 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3967 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003968
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003969- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3970 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3971 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003972
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003973- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3974 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003975
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003976- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3977 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3978 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3979 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3980 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003981
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003982- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3983 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3984 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3985
3986- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3987 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3988 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003989
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003990- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3991 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3992 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3993 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003994 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003995
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003996- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3997 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003998
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003999- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4000 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004001
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004002- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004003 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004004 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4005 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004006
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004007
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004008What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004009===============================
4010
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004011*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4012
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004013Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004014--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004015
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004016- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4017 with a custom metaclass.
4018
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004019Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004020-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004021
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004022- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4023 are proxies.
4024
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004025Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004026-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004027
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004028- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4029 very short strings.
4030
4031- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4032 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4033 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4034 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4035 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4036
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004037Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004038-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004039
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004040- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4041 close or delete time).
4042
4043- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4044 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4045
4046- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4047
4048- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004049 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004050
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004051Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004052-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004053
4054Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004055-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004056
4057C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004058-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004059
4060New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004061-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004062
4063Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004064-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004065
4066Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004067-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004068
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004069- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4070
4071- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4072 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4073
4074- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4075 deleted at process exit time.
4076
4077- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4078 in backslash.
4079
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004080Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004081----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004082
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004083- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4084 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4085 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4086
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004087
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004088What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004089===========================
4090
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004091*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4092
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004093Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004094--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004095
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004096- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4097 been extensively updated. See
4098
4099 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4100
4101 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4102
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004103- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4104 deleted!
4105
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004106- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4107 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4108 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4109 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4110 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4111
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004112- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4113
4114 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4115 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4116
4117 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4118 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4119 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4120 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4121 supported anyway.
4122
4123 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4124 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4125
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004126- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4127 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4128 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4129 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4130 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004131
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004132- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4133 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4134 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4135
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004136Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004137-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004138
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004139- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4140 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4141 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4142 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4143 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4144 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004145 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4146 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4147 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4148 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004149
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004150- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4151 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4152 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4153
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004154Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004155-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004156
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004157- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4158
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004159Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004160-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004161
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004162- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4163 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4164 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4165 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4166 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4167 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4168
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004169- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4170
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004171- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4172
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004173- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4174
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004175- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4176 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4177 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4178
4179- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4180
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004181Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004182-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004183
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004184- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4185 off a search on Google.
4186
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004187Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004188-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004189
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004190- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4191 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4192 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4193 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4194 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4195 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4196 other platforms should do likewise.
4197
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004198- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4199 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4200 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4201
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004202C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004203-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004204
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004205- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4206 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4207 producing key-value pairs.
4208
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004209- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004210 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004211 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4212 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4213 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4214 previously went unchallenged.
4215
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004216New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004217-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004218
4219Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004220-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004221
4222Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004223-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004224
4225Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004226----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004227
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004228- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4229 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004230
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004231- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4232 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4233 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4234 home.
4235
4236
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004237What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004238===========================
4239
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004240*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4241
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004242Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004243--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004244
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004245- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4246 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004247
4248 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004249 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004250
4251 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4252 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004253 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004254 This needs to be documented.
4255
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004256- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4257 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4258
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004259- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4260 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4261 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4262
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004263- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4264 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4265
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004266- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4267 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4268 class forbids it).
4269
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004270- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4271 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4272 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4273
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004274- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4275
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004276Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004277-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004278
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004279- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4280 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004281 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004282
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004283- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4284 (like 1 + '').
4285
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004286Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004287-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004288
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004289- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4290 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4291 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4292 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004293 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004294 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4295
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004296- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4297 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4298 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4299 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4300
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004301- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4302 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004303 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4304 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4305 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004306
4307- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4308 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004309
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004310- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4311 bytes on its input.
4312
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004313Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004314-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004315
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004316- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004317 convenience function.
4318
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004319- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4320 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4321 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004322 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4323 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4324 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4325 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4326 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4327 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004328
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004329- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4330 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4331 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4332 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4333
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004334- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4335 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4336 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4337
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004338- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4339 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4340 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4341 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4342
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004343- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4344 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004345 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004346 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4347 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4348 new -l and -e options.
4349
4350- statcache is now deprecated.
4351
4352- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4353 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004354 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004355 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4356 time properly taken into account.
4357
4358- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4359 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4360 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4361 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4362
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004363Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004364-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004365
4366Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004367-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004368
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004369- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4370 is built with libdb3 if available.
4371
4372- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4373
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004374C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004375-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004376
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004377- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4378 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4379 PySequence_Size().
4380
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004381- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4382
4383- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4384 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4385 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4386
4387- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4388 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4389
4390- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4391 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4392
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004393New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004394-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004395
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004396- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4397 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4398
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004399- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4400 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4401
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004402- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4403
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004404Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004405-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004406
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004407- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4408 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4409
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004410Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004411-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004412
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004413Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004414----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004415
4416- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4417 removed completely in the next release.
4418
4419- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4420 OSX.
4421
4422- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4423 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4424
4425- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4426
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004427
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004428What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004429===========================
4430
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004431*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4432
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004433Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004434--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004435
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004436- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004437 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004438 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004439 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4440 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004441 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4442 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004443 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4444 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004445
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004446- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4447 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4448
4449- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4450 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4451
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004452Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004453-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004454
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004455- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4456 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4457 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4458 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4459 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4460 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4461 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4462 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4463
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004464- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4465 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4466 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4467 example).
4468
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004469- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004470 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004471 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004472 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004473
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004474- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4475 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4476 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004477 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004478
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004479- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4480 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4481 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4482 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4483 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4484 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4485
4486 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4487
4488 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4489
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004490Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004491-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004492
4493- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4494
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004495- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4496
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004497- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4498 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004499
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004500- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4501 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4502 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4503 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4504 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4505 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004506 attributes.
4507
4508- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4509 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4510 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004511
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004512- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4513 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4514 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004515
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004516- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4517 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4518 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004519 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4520 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4521
4522- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4523 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004524
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004525Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004526-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004527
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004528- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4529 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4530
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004531- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4532 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4533 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4534 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4535
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004536- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4537 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4538 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4539 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4540
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004541 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4542 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4543 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4544 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4545 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4546 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4547 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4548 without losing information).
4549
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004550- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004551 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4552 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4553 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4554 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4555 module).
4556
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004557 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004558 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4559 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4560 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4561 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004562
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004563- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004564 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4565 encoding.
4566
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004567- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4568 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4569
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004570- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004571 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4572
4573- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4574 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4575 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4576 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4577
4578- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4579
4580- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4581 ON, and OFF.
4582
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004583- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4584 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4585
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004586Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004587-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004588
4589- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4590 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4591 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004592
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004593- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4594 been added: -X and -E.
4595
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004596Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004597-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004598
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004599- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4600 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4601
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004602C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004603-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004604
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004605- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4606 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4607 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4608 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4609 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4610
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004611- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4612 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4613 as long) arguments.
4614
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004615- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4616 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4617 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4618 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4619 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4620 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4621
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004622- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4623 input.
4624
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004625New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004626-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004627
4628Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004629-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004630
4631Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004632-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004633
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004634- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4635 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4636 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4637
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004638- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4639 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4640 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004641 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004642
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004643 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4644 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4645 import signal
4646 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004647
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004648 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004649 while 1:
4650 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004652 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4653 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4654 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4655 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004656
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004657
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004658What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4659===========================
4660
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004661*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4662
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004663Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004664--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004665
4666- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4667 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4668 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4669
4670- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4671 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4672 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4673 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4674 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4675 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4676 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004677
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004678- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004679 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004680 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4681 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4682 associate a docstring with a property.
4683
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004684- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4685 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4686 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4687 other built-in object types.
4688
4689- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4690 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4691 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4692 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4693 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4694
4695- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4696 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4697
4698- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4699 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004700 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004701 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4702 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4703 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4704 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4705 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4706
4707- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4708 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4709 class.
4710
4711- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4712 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4713 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4714 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4715
4716- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4717 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4718 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4719 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4720
4721- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4722 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4723
4724- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4725 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4726 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4727 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4728 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004729 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004730 with the same value as s.
4731
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004732- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4733
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004734Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004735----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004736
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004737- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4738
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004739- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4740 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4741 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4742 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4743 objects.
4744
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004745- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4746 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004747 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4748 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4749
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004750- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4751 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4752 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4753
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004754Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004755-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004756
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004757- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4758 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4759 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4760 by the instances.
4761
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004762- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4763 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4764 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4765
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004766- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4767 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4768 before the entire comparison is complete.
4769
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004770- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4771 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4772 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4773
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004774- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4775 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4776 getwriter().
4777
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004778- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4779 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4780
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004781- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004782 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4783 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4784
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004785- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4786 iterable object.
4787
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004788- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4789 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004790
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004791- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4792 authentication.
4793
4794- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4795 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004796
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004797- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004798 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4799 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4800 a sample driver.)
4801
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004802Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004803-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004804
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004805- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4806 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4807 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4808 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4809 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4810 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4811 kernel has large file support.
4812
4813- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4814 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4815 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4816 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4817 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4818
4819- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4820 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4821 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4822
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004823C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004824-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004825
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004826- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4827 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4828
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004829New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004830-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004831
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004832- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4833 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4834
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004835Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004836-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004837
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004838- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4839 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4840 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4841 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4842 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4843
4844- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4845 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4846 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4847 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4848
4849- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4850 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4851
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004852Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004853-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004854
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004855- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004856 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4857 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004858
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004859
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004860What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4861===========================
4862
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004863*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4864
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004865Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004866----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004867
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004868- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4869 big to represent as a C double.
4870
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004871- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4872 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4873 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4874 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4875 restriction).
4876
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004877- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4878 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4879 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4880 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4881 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4882
4883 >>> dir([])
4884 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4885 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4886 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4887 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4888 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4889 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4890 'reverse', 'sort']
4891
4892 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4893
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004894- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004895 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4896 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4897 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4898 OverflowError exception.
4899
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004900- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004901 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004902 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4903 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4904 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4905 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4906 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004907 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004908 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4909 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4910
4911 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4912 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4913 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4914 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004915
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004916- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004917 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4918 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4919 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4920 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4921 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4922 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4923 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4924 once it is created.
4925
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004926- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4927 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4928 (key, value) pairs.
4929
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004930- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004931 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4932 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4933
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004934- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4935 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4936 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4937 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4938 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004939
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004940- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004941 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4942 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4943
4944 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4945
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004946- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004947 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4948
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004949Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004950-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004951
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004952- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004953 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4954 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004955
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004956- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4957 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4958 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4959 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4960 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4961 in this area anymore).
4962
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004963- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4964 threading.Timer.
4965
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004966- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4967 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4968
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004969- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004970 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4971
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004972- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004973 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4974 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4975 converted to Python longs.
4976
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004977- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004978 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4979
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004980- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4981 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4982 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4983
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004984Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004985-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004986
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004987- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4988 division operators as per PEP 238.
4989
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004990Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004991-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004992
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004993- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4994 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4995 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4996 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4997
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004998C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004999-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005000
5001- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005002
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005003- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5004 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005005 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005006
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005007 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5008 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005009 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005010 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005011
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005012- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005013 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5014 module:
5015
5016 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005017
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005018 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5019 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005020
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005021 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5022 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005023
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005024 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5025
5026 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5027
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005028- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005029 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5030 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5031 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005032
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005033New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005034-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005035
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005036- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5037 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5038 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5039 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5040 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005041
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005042Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005043-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005044
5045Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005046-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005047
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005048- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5049 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5050 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5051 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005052 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5053 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5054 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5055 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5056 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005057
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005058- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005059 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5060
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005061
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005062What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5063===========================
5064
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005065*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5066
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005067Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005068-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005069
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005070- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5071 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5072
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005073- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5074 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5075 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005076
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005077- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5078 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5079 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5080 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005081
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005082- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5083
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005084- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005085
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005086Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005087-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005088
5089- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005090 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005091 the module docstring for details.
5092
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005093Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005094-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005095
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005096- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005097 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5098 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5099 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005100
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005101- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5102 Nick Mathewson.
5103
5104Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005105----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005106
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005107- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5108 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5109 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5110 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5111 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5112 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5113 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5114 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5115
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005116- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5117 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5118 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5119 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5120
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005121- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5122 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5123 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5124 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5125 come a long way).
5126
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005127- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5128 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5129 write filters for these warnings).
5130
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005131- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5132 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5133 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5134 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5135 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5136
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005137- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5138 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5139 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5140 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5141 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5142 older distribution.
5143
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005144Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005145-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005146
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005147- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5148 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005149 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005150
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005151- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5152 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5153 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5154
5155- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5156
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005157- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5158
5159- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5160
5161- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5162
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005163- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005164
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005165- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5166
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005167New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005168-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005169
5170C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005171-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005172
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005173- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5174 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5175 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5176 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5177 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5178 against buffer overruns.
5179
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005180- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005181 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5182 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005183 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5184 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5185 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5186
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005187- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5188 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5189 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5190 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5191 deprecated.
5192
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005193Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005194-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005195
5196- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5197 relevant is found.
5198
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005199
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005200What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005201===========================
5202
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005203*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5204
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005205Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005206----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005207
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005208- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5209 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5210 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5211 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5212 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5213 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5214 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5215 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005216 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005217 repaired.
5218
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005219- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005220 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005221 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5222 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5223 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5224 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5225 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5226 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5227 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5228 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5229
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005230- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5231 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5232 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5233 leading BMO character).
5234
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005235- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5236 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5237 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5238
5239 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5240 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5241 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005242
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005243 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5244 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5245 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5246 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5247 for various simple to use conversions.
5248
5249 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5250 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5251
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005252 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5253 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5254 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5255 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5256 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5257 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5258 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5259 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5260 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5261 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5262 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5263 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5264 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5265 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5266 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005267
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005268- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5269 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5270 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005271 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005272 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005273
5274 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005275 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5276 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5277 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5278 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5279 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005280 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5281 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005282
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005283 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5284 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5285 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005286 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005287
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005288- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5289 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5290 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5291 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5292 floating arithmetic,
5293
5294 x = 9007199254740992.0
5295 print long(x)
5296
5297 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5298 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5299 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5300 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5301 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5302 functions are of good quality).
5303
5304 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5305 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5306 algorithms to break.
5307
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005308- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5309 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5310 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5311 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5312 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5313 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5314 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5315 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5316 order.
5317
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005318- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5319 operation along the most common code paths.
5320
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005321- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5322 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5323
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005324- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5325 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5326 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5327 {}.update(UserDict())
5328
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005329- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5330 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5331 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5332 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5333 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5334 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5335 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5336 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5337
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005338- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005339 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005340
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005341 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005342 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5343 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005344 join() method of strings
5345 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005346 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5347 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005348 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005349 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005350
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005351- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5352 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5353
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005354- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5355 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5356
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005357- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5358 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5359 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5360 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5361
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005362- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5363 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005364 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005365 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5366 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005367
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005368- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5369
5370
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005371Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005372-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005373
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005374- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005375 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005376 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5377 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5378
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005379- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5380 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5381
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005382- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5383 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5384 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5385 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5386
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005387- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5388 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5389 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5390
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005391- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5392
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005393- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5394
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005395- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5396 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5397 that are still imported into string.py).
5398
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005399- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5400
5401- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5402 Now it does.
5403
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005404- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5405
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005406- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5407 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5408 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5409 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5410 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005411 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5412 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005413
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005414- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5415 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5416 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5417 'help(object)'.
5418
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005419Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005420-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005421
5422- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005423 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005424 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5425 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5426
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005427- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005428 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5429 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005430
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005431C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005432-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005433
5434- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5435 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005436
5437----
5438
5439**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**