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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
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +000040- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
41
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000042- Enhancements to the csv module:
43
44 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
45 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
46 PEP 305.
47 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
48 reporting.
49 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
50 dictates.
51 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000052 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000053 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000054 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
55 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000056 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
57 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +000058 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000059 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
60 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
61 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
62 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
63 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
64 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
65 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
66 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
67 without first creating a dialect class.
68 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
69 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
70 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +000071 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000072 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
73 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +000074 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
75 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
76 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
77 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000078 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
79 This has been fixed.
80
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +000081- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
82 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
83 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
84 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
85
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +000086- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
87
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +000088- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
89 (Bug #951915).
90
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +000091- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
92 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
93 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
94 encoding alias table
95
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +000096- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
97
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000098- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
99 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
100
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000101- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
102
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000103- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
104
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000105- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
106
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000107- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
108
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000109- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
110
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000111- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
112 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
113 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
114
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000115- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000116 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000117
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000118- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
119 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
120 tokenizer with very long source lines.
121
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000122- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
123 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
124
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000125
126Build
127-----
128
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000129- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
130 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
131 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
132 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
133 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
134 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
135 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
136 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
137
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000138
139C API
140-----
141
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000142- Removed PyRange_New().
143
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000144
145Tests
146-----
147
148
149Mac
150---
151
152
153
154Tools/Demos
155-----------
156
157
158
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000159What's New in Python 2.4 final?
160===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000161
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000162*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000163
164Core and builtins
165-----------------
166
167- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
168 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
169 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
170
171
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000172What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
173==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000174
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000175*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000176
177Core and builtins
178-----------------
179
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000180- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
181 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
182 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
183
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000184
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000185Library
186-------
187
188- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
189 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
190 raised is re-raised.
191
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000192- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
193 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
194
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000195- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
196 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
197 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
198 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
199 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
200 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
201 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
202 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
203 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
204 by the slice are recomputed now.
205
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000206- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000207
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000208Build
209-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000210
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000211- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
212 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
213 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000214
215C API
216-----
217
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000218- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
219
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000220
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000221What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
222================================
223
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000224*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000225
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000226License
227-------
228
229The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
230is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
231changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
232Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
233intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
234durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
235the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
236License::
237
238 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
239
240says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
241to Python 2.1.1.
242
243The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
244License Version 2.
245
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000246Core and builtins
247-----------------
248
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000249- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
250 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
251 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
252 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
253 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
254 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
255 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
256 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
257 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
258 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
259
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000260- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000261
262Extension Modules
263-----------------
264
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000265- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
266 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
267 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
268 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000269
270Library
271-------
272
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000273- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
274 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
275 returned.
276
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000277- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
278
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000279- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
280 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
281
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000282- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
283
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000284- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
285 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000286
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000287- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
288
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000289- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
290
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000291- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000292 the source code is updated and reloaded.
293
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000294Build
295-----
296
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000297- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000298
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000299What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
300================================
301
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000302*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000303
304Core and builtins
305-----------------
306
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000307- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000308 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
309
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000310- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
311 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
312 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
313 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
314
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000315- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
316 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
317
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000318- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
319 constant.
320
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000321- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
322 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
323 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
324 large), and to anomalies such as
325 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
326 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
327 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
328 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000329
330Extension modules
331-----------------
332
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000333- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
334 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000335 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
336 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
337 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000338
339Library
340-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000341
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000342- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000343 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000344 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
345 --swig-cpp.
346
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000347- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
348 it is set.
349
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000350- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000351
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000352- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
353 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
354 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
355 Closes bug #1039270.
356
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000357- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000358
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000359 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000360 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
361 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
362 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
363 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
364 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
365 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
366 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
367 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
368 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
369 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
370 + Updates to documentation.
371
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000372- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
373 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
374 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
375 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
376
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000377- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000378
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000379- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
380 applications should use the getmember function.
381
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000382- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
383
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000384- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
385 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
386 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
387 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
388 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
389 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
390 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
391 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
392 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
393
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000394- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
395 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000396 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000397
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000398- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
399 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
400 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
401 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
402 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
403 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
404 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
405 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000406
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000407- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
408 the new public features (of which there are many).
409
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000410- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000411 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
412 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
413 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
414 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000415 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000416
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000417- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
418
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000419- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
420 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
421 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
422 options.
423
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000424- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
425 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
426 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
427 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
428 conditions under which non-string values work.
429
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000430Build
431-----
432
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000433- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
434 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
435 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
436
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000437- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
438 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
439 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
440 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
441 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000442
443C API
444-----
445
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000446- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
447 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
448
449- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
450
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000451- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
452 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
453 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
454 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
455 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
456 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
457 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
458 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
459 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
460
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000461- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
462
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000463- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
464 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
465 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000466
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000467Tests
468-----
469
470- test__locale ported to unittest
471
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000472Mac
473---
474
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000475- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
476 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
477 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000478
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000479Tools/Demos
480-----------
481
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000482- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
483 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
484 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
485 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
486 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000487
488
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000489What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
490=================================
491
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000492*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000493
494Core and builtins
495-----------------
496
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000497- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000498 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
499
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000500- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
501 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
502 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
503 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
504 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
505 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
506 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
507 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000508 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
509 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
510 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
511 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
512 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000513
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000514- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
515 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
516 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
517 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
518 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
519
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000520- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
521
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000522- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
523 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
524
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000525- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
526 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
527 modified the list.
528
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000529- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
530 functions is now writable.
531
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000532- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
533 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
534 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
535 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
536
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000537- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
538 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
539 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
540 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
541 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000542
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000543- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
544 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
545
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000546Extension modules
547-----------------
548
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000549- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
550
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000551- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
552 data.
553
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000554- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
555 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
556 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
557 supposed to have been truncated away.
558
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000559- Added socket.socketpair().
560
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000561- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
562 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
563
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000564- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000565 versions of Python, have now been removed.
566
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000567Library
568-------
569
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000570- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000571 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000572
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000573- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
574 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
575
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000576- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
577 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
578
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000579- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
580
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000581- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
582 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000583
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000584- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
585 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
586
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000587- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
588
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000589- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
590
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000591- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
592
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000593- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
594 Percivall.
595
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000596- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
597 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
598
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000599- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
600 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
601 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000602 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000603
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000604- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
605 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
606 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
607 and exponent.
608
609- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
610
611- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
612 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
613 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
614
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000615- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
616 to the readline module.
617
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000618- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000619 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
620 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000621
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000622- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
623 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
624 contains symlinks.
625
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000626- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
627 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
628
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000629- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
630 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
631 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
632
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000633- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
634 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
635 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
636 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
637 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
638 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
639 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
640 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
641 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
642 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
643 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
644 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
645 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
646
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000647- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
648
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000649Tools/Demos
650-----------
651
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000652- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
653 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
654
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000655- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
656
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000657Build
658-----
659
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000660- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
661 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
662 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
663 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
664 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
665 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
666 plans to do so.
667
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000668- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
669 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
670
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000671- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
672 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
673
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000674- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
675 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
676
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000677- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
678 GNU/k*BSD systems.
679
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000680- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
681 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
682
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000683C API
684-----
685
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000686..
687
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000688Documentation
689-------------
690
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000691- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
692 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
693
694- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
695 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
696 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000697
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000698New platforms
699-------------
700
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000701- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
702
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000703Tests
704-----
705
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000706..
707
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000708Windows
709-------
710
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000711- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
712 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
713 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
714 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
715 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
716 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
717 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
718 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
719 the problem.
720
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000721Mac
722---
723
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000724..
725
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000726
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000727What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
728=================================
729
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000730*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000731
732Core and builtins
733-----------------
734
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000735- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
736 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
737 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
738 sensitive code.
739
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000740- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000741 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000742
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000743 @staticmethod
744 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000745
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000746 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000747
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000748- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
749 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
750 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
751 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
752 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
753 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
754 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
755 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
756 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
757 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
758 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
759
760 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
761 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
762 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
763 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
764 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
765 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
766 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
767
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000768- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
769 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
770
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000771- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000772 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000773
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000774- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000775 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000776 which was missing for no apparent reason.
777
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000778- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000779 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
780 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
781
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000782- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
783 types that support garbage collection.
784
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000785- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
786
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000787- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
788 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
789 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
790 Jython.
791
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000792- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
793
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000794- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
795 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
796
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000797- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
798 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
799 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000800
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000801- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
802 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
803 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
804
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000805Extension modules
806-----------------
807
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000808- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
809
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000810Library
811-------
812
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000813- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
814 TIS-620
815
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000816- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
817 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
818 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
819 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
820 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
821 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
822 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
823 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
824 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
825 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
826
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000827- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
828
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000829- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
830 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
831 same as when the argument is omitted).
832 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
833
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000834- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
835
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000836- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
837 schemes are offered.
838
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000839- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
840
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000841- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
842 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
843 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
844
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000845- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
846
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000847- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
848 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
849
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000850- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
851 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
852 when dummy_threading is being used.
853
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000854- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
855 from a tarfile.
856
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000857- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000858 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000859
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000860- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
861 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
862 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
863 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
864
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000865- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
866 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
867
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000868- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
869 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
870 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
871 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
872 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
873 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
874 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
875 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
876 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
877 by some other method in progress).
878
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000879- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
880 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
881 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000882
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000883- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
884
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000885- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
886 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
887 AM Kuchling.
888
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000889- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
890 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
891 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
892
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000893- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
894 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
895 instead of unsigned.
896
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000897- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000898 no longer part of the public API.
899
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000900- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
901 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
902 string methods of the same name).
903
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000904- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000905 SF patch 945642.
906
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000907- doctest unittest integration improvements:
908
909 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
910
911 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
912 DocTestSuites.
913
914- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
915 that provide thread-local data.
916
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000917- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
918 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
919
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000920- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
921
922- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
923 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
924 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
925
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000926- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
927
928 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
929 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
930 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000931
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000932 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
933 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
934 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
935 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
936
937 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
938 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
939
940 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
941 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
942 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
943 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
944
945 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
946 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
947 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
948 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
949 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
950
951 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
952 wrapping help output.
953
954 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
955 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
956 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000957
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000958C API
959-----
960
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000961- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
962 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
963 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
964 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
965 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
966 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
967 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
968 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
969 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
970 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
971 its visible semantics have not changed.
972
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000973- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
974 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
975
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000976Documentation
977-------------
978
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000979- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000980
981 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000982 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000983
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000984 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000985
986 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
987
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000988- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000989
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000990Tests
991-----
992
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000993- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000994 platforms that use the Makefile.
995
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000996- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
997 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
998 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
999
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001000
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001001What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1002=================================
1003
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001004*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001005
1006Core and builtins
1007-----------------
1008
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001009- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1010 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1011 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1012 objects now (one object instead of three).
1013
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001014- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1015 Windows DLLs.
1016
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001017- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1018 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001019
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001020- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1021 a new .pyc magic.
1022
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001023- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1024 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1025 be there.
1026
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001027- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1028 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1029 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1030
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001031- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1032 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1033 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1034
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001035- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1036
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001037- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1038 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1039 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001040
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001041- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1042 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1043
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001044- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1045
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001046- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001047 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001048
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001049- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1050
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001051- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1052
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001053- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1054 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1055
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001056- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1057 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1058 Fixes bug #858016 .
1059
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001060- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1061 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1062 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1063
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001064- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1065 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1066 improves their performance (about 35%).
1067
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001068- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1069 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1070 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1071
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001072- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1073 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1074 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1075 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1076
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001077- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1078 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1079 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1080 length is not known).
1081
1082- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1083 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001084 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1085 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001086 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1087
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001088- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1089 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1090
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001091- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1092 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1093 keyword arguments.
1094
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001095- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1096 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1097 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1098
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001099- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1100 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1101 cases.
1102
1103- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1104 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1105 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1106 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1107 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1108 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1109 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1110 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1111 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1112 a release build.
1113
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001114- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1115 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1116
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001117- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001118 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001119
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001120- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1121 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1122 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1123 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1124 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1125 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1126 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1127 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1128 destroyed.
1129
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001130- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1131 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1132 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1133 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1134 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1135 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1136 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1137 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1138
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001139- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1140 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1141 character other than a space.
1142
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001143- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1144 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1145 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1146 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1147 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1148 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1149 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1150 attributes with the same name.
1151
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001152- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1153 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1154 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1155 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1156 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1157 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1158 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1159 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1160 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1161 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1162 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1163 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1164 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1165 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001166
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001167- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1168 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1169 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1170 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1171 This has been repaired.
1172
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001173- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1174
1175- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1176
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001177- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1178 over a sequence.
1179
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001180- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001181 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001182
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001183- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1184
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001185- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1186 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1187 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1188 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1189 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1190 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1191 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1192 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1193
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001194- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1195 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1196 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1197
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001198- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1199 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1200 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1201 freelist.
1202
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001203- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1204 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1205
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001206- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1207 number.
1208
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001209- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1210 a TypeError exception.
1211
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001212- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1213 820195.
1214
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001215- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1216 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1217 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1218
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001219- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001220 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1221 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001222
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001223- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1224 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1225 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1226
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001227- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1228 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001229 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001230
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001231- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001232 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1233 the first call.
1234
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001235
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001236Extension modules
1237-----------------
1238
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001239- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1240 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1241
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001242- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1243 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1244 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1245 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1246 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1247 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1248 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001249
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001250- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1251
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001252- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1253
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001254- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1255 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1256
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001257- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1258 fewer false positives.
1259
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001260- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1261 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1262
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001263- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001264 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1265
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001266- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001267 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001268 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001269 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1270 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001271
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001272- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1273 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1274 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1275 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1276
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001277- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1278 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1279 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1280 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1281 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1282 #897625.
1283
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001284- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1285 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1286
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001287- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1288 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1289 and pops on either side of the deque.
1290
1291- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1292 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1293
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001294- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1295 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1296 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1297 other functions that expect a function argument.
1298
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001299- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1300
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001301- os.getsid was added.
1302
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001303- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1304 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1305 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1306
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001307- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1308
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001309- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1310
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001311- readline.clear_history was added.
1312
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001313- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1314
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001315- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1316
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001317- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1318
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001319- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1320
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001321- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1322
1323- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1324
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001325- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1326
1327- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1328
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001329- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1330 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1331 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1332
1333- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1334 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1335 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1336 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1337 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1338 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1339 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1340
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001341- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1342 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1343 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1344 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001345
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001346- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001347 iterators from a single iterable.
1348
1349- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1350 of raising a TypeError exception.
1351
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001352- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1353 as parameter.
1354
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001355Library
1356-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001357
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001358- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1359 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1360 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001361
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001362- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1363 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1364 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001365
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001366- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001367
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001368- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1369 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001370
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001371- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1372 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1373
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001374- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1375
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001376- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001377 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001378
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001379- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001380 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001381
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001382- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1383
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001384- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1385 on cygwin and mingw32.
1386
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001387- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1388
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001389- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1390 module.
1391
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001392- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1393 installation scheme for all platforms.
1394
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001395- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001396 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001397
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001398- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1399 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1400 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1401
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001402- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1403 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1404 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1405
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001406- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1407
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001408- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1409
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001410- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1411 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1412
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001413- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1414 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1415 type pattern with the same value exists.
1416
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001417- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1418 when run from the command prompt).
1419
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001420- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1421 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1422
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001423- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1424 default sort).
1425
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001426- Added global runctx function to profile module
1427
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001428- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1429
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001430- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1431
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001432- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1433
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001434- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001435 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1436 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1437 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1438 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1439 accordingly.
1440
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001441- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1442 decoding standards.
1443
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001444- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1445 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1446 called for all requests.
1447
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001448- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1449 they are passed to the compiler.
1450
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001451- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1452 indent, width and depth.
1453
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001454- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1455 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1456
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001457- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1458 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1459
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001460- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1461
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001462- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1463
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001464- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1465
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001466- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1467 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1468
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001469- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001470 for better performance.
1471
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001472- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001473
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001474- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1475 a string).
1476
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001477- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1478
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001479- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1480
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001481- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1482
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001483- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1484
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001485- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1486 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1487 list of fieldnames.
1488
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001489- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1490 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1491
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001492- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1493
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001494- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1495 empty lists.
1496
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001497- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1498 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1499 and shelves.
1500
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001501- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1502 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1503
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001504- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001505 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1506 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001507
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001508- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1509 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001510 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001511
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001512- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001513 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1514 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1515
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001516- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1517 and removed in Py2.4.
1518
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001519- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1520
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001521- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1522
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001523Tools/Demos
1524-----------
1525
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001526- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1527 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1528
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001529- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1530
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001531- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1532 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1533 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1534 destination in situations where both files are given.
1535
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001536- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1537 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1538 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1539 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1540
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001541- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1542
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001543- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1544 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1545 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1546 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1547 now.
1548
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001549- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1550 in effect
1551
1552- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1553 C-c C-h
1554
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001555- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1556 -d option was given.
1557
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001558Build
1559-----
1560
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001561- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1562 build under OS X.
1563
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001564- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1565 --enable-profiling.
1566
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001567- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1568 is configured --with-tsc.
1569
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001570- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1571 on AMD64.
1572
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001573- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1574 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1575
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001576- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1577 removed.
1578
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001579- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1580 supported (see PEP 11).
1581
1582- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1583
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001584- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1585
1586- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1587 (see PEP 11).
1588
1589- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1590 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1591
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001592C API
1593-----
1594
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001595- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1596 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1597 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1598
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001599- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1600 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1601 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1602 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1603
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001604- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1605 generator objects.
1606
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001607- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1608 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001609 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1610 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001611
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001612- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1613 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1614
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001615- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1616 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1617 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1618 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1619 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1620
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001621- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1622 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1623 about 10% faster.
1624
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001625- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1626 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1627
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001628- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1629 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1630 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1631 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1632
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001633Windows
1634-------
1635
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001636- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1637 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1638 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1639 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1640
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001641- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1642 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1643 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1644
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001645
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001646What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1647===============================
1648
1649*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1650
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001651IDLE
1652----
1653
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001654- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1655 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1656 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1657 context-menu actions.
1658
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001659- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1660 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1661 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1662 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1663 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1664 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1665 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1666 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1667 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1668
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001669
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001670What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1671=============================================
1672
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001673*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001674
1675Core and builtins
1676-----------------
1677
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001678- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001679 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001680 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1681
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001682Extension modules
1683-----------------
1684
1685- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1686 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1687 than once. This has been fixed.
1688
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001689- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1690 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1691 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1692 call.
1693
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001694- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1695
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001696Library
1697-------
1698
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001699- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1700 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1701
1702- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1703 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1704 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1705 restored.
1706
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001707IDLE
1708----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001709
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001710- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001711
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001712Build
1713-----
1714
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001715- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1716 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1717
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001718C API
1719-----
1720
1721Windows
1722-------
1723
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001724- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1725 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1726
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001727- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1728
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001729Mac
1730---
1731
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001732- Various fixes to pimp.
1733
1734- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1735
1736- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1737 more problems than it solves.
1738
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001739
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001740What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1741=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001742
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001743*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1744
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001745Core and builtins
1746-----------------
1747
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001748- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1749 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1750
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001751- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1752 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001753 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001754
1755- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1756 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1757 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001758 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001759
1760- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1761 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001762
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001763- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1764 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1765 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1766
1767- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001768 770247.
1769
1770- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001771
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001772Extension modules
1773-----------------
1774
1775- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1776 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1777
1778- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1779
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001780- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1781
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001782- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1783 contained within the _strptime module.
1784
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001785- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1786 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1787
1788- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001789 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1790
1791- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1792 the find_class attribute, if present.
1793
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001794- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001795
1796 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1797 (SF bug 763298).
1798
1799 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001800 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1801 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1802 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001803
1804 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1805
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001806Library
1807-------
1808
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001809- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1810
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001811- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1812 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1813 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1814 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1815 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1816 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1817 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1818 or Tester().
1819
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001820- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1821 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1822 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1823 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1824 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1825 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1826 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1827 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1828 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001829
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001830 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001831
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001832- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1833 weren't before was an oversight.
1834
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001835- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1836 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1837
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001838- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1839 when there are no lines.
1840
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001841- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1842 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1843
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001844- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1845 to child processes.
1846
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001847- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1848
1849- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1850
1851- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1852 xmlrpclib.
1853
1854- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1855 responses.
1856
1857- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1858 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1859
1860- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1861 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1862 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1863
1864- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1865 used as patterns.
1866
1867- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1868 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1869 than Tk 8.3.
1870
1871- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1872
1873- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001874
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001875Tools/Demos
1876-----------
1877
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001878- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1879
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001880- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1881
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001882- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001883
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001884Build
1885-----
1886
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001887- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1888
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001889- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1890
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001891- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1892 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001893
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001894- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1895 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1896 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001897
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001898C API
1899-----
1900
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001901- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1902 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1903
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001904Windows
1905-------
1906
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001907- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1908 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1909 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1910 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1911 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1912 Python exception ::
1913
1914 thread.error: can't start new thread
1915
1916 is raised now.
1917
1918- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1919 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1920 instead of from DLL teardown.
1921
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001922Mac
1923---
1924
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001925- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001926 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001927 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1928 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1929 the executable in the bundle.
1930
1931- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001932
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001933- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1934
1935- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1936 on Panther.
1937
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001938What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1939================================
1940
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001941*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001942
1943Core and builtins
1944-----------------
1945
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001946- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1947 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1948 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1949 with the -i option.
1950
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001951- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1952 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1953
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001954- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1955 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1956
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001957- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1958 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1959 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1960 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1961 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1962 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1963 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1964 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1965 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1966 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1967 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1968 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1969 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001970
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001971- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1972 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1973 embedded in a lambda expression.
1974
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001975- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1976 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1977 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1978 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1979 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1980
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001981- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1982 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1983 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1984
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001985- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1986 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1987
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001988- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1989 It's writable again.
1990
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001991- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1992 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1993 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001994 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001995
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001996- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1997 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1998 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1999
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002000Extension modules
2001-----------------
2002
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002003- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2004 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2005
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002006- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2007 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2008 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2009 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2010
2011- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2012 collection.
2013
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002014- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2015 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2016 unique within a single program run.
2017
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002018- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2019 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2020
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002021- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2022 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2023
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002024- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2025 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002026
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002027- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2028
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002029- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2030 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2031
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002032- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2033 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2034 for many BSD-derived systems.
2035
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002036
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002037Library
2038-------
2039
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002040- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2041 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2042 primary ones:
2043
2044 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2045 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2046 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2047
2048 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2049 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2050 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2051 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2052 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2053 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2054
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002055- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2056 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2057 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2058 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2059 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2060 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2061 argument.
2062
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002063- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2064 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2065 in the archive.
2066
2067- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2068 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2069
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002070- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2071 569574).
2072
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002073- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2074 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2075 no more.
2076
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002077- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2078 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2079 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2080 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2081 code coverage.
2082
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002083- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2084 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2085 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002086 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2087 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002088
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002089- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2090 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2091 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002092 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002093
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002094- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2095
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002096- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2097 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2098 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2099 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2100
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002101- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2102 handling.
2103
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002104- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2105 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2106
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002107- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2108 in socket.py.
2109
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002110- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2111
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002112- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2113 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2114 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2115 opener with proxy support.
2116
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002117- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2118
2119- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2120
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002121Tools/Demos
2122-----------
2123
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002124- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2125
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002126- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2127
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002128- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2129 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002130
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002131- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2132 files.
2133
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002134Build
2135-----
2136
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002137- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002138 different root directory.
2139
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002140C API
2141-----
2142
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002143- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2144 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2145 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2146 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2147 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2148 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2149 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2150 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2151 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2152 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2153
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002154- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2155 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2156 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2157 from Python.
2158
2159
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002160New platforms
2161-------------
2162
2163None this time.
2164
2165Tests
2166-----
2167
2168- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2169 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2170
2171Windows
2172-------
2173
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002174- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2175
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002176- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2177 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2178 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2179 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2180 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2181 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2182 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2183 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2184 that's what it's for.
2185
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002186Mac
2187---
2188
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002189- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2190 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2191 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2192 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002193- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2194 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2195- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002196
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002197SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2198------------------------------------
2199
2200430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2201598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2202622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2203661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2204683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2205697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2206713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2207724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2208727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2209729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2210730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2211731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2212732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2213733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2214735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2215740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2216744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2217745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2218747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2219749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2220751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2221753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2222755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2223757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2224760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2225
2226
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002227What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2228================================
2229
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002230*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002231
2232Core and builtins
2233-----------------
2234
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002235- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2236 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2237
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002238- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2239 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2240 and cannot be strings).
2241
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002242- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2243 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2244 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2245 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2246
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002247- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2248 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2249 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2250 Python itself.
2251
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002252- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2253 the referenced object, if it has one.
2254
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002255- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2256 the thread started at
2257 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2258
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002259- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2260 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2261 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2262 placed on a list index.
2263
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002264- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2265 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2266 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2267 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2268
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002269- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2270 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2271 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2272 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2273 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2274 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2275 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2276
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002277- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2278 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2279 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2280 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2281 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2282
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002283- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2284 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002285
2286- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2287 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2288 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2289 #693195.)
2290
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002291- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2292 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002293
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002294- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002295 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002296 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2297 interpreter executions, would fail.
2298
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002299- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002300 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002301 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002302
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002303Extension modules
2304-----------------
2305
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002306- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2307 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2308 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2309 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2310
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002311- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2312 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2313
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002314- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2315 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2316 and Greg Chapman.)
2317
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002318- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2319 recursively.
2320
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002321- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002322 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2323 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2324 leaks.
2325
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002326- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2327
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002328- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2329 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2330 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2331 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2332 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2333 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2334 #705836.
2335
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002336- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002337 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2338
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002339- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2340 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2341 See SF bug #692416.
2342
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002343- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2344 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2345
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002346- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2347 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2348 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002349
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002350- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002351 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2352 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2353
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002354- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2355 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2356 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2357 timeouts to work properly.
2358
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002359Library
2360-------
2361
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002362- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2363 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2364 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2365 future release.
2366
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002367- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2368 for querying platform dependent features.
2369
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002370- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002371
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002372- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2373 pickle protocol versions.
2374
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002375- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2376 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2377 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2378
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002379- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2380
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002381- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2382 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2383 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2384 modules.
2385
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002386- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2387 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2388 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2389
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002390- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2391 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2392
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002393- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2394 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2395 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2396
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002397- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002398 MS Office extensions.
2399
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002400- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2401 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2402
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002403- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2404 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2405
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002406- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2407 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2408 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2409 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2410 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2411 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2412
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002413- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2414 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2415 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002416
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002417- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2418 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2419 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2420
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002421- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2422
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002423- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2424 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2425 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2426
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002427Tools/Demos
2428-----------
2429
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002430- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2431 See the module docstring for details.
2432
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002433Build
2434-----
2435
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002436- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2437 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002438
2439C API
2440-----
2441
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002442- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2443
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002444- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2445 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2446 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2447
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002448- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2449 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002450
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002451 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2452 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2453 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002454
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002455- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002456 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2457
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002458- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2459 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2460 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002461
2462New platforms
2463-------------
2464
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002465None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002466
2467Tests
2468-----
2469
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002470- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2471 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002472
2473Windows
2474-------
2475
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002476- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2477 function.
2478
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002479- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2480 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002481
2482Mac
2483---
2484
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002485- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2486 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002487
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002488- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2489 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002490
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002491- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2492 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2493 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002494
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002495- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002496 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2497 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002498
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002499- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2500 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002501
2502
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002503What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2504=================================
2505
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002506*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002507
2508Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002509-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002510
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002511- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2512 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2513 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2514
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002515- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2516 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2517 (SF patch #664376.)
2518
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002519- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2520 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2521 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2522 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2523 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2524 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002525 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002526
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002527- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2528 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2529 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2530 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002531 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002532
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002533- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2534 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2535 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2536 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2537 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2538 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2539 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2540 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2541 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2542 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2543 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2544
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002545- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2546 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2547 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2548 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2549 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2550 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2551
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002552- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2553 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2554
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002555- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2556 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2557 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2558 case.)
2559
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002560- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2561 passed as unicode strings.
2562
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002563- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2564 See SF bug #683467.
2565
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002566- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2567 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2568
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002569- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2570
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002571- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2572
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002573- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2574 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2575 arguments.
2576
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002577- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2578 See SF bug #667147.
2579
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002580- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002581 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002582 See SF bug #676155.
2583
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002584- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002585 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002586 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2587 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2588 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2589 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2590 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2591 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002592
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002593Extension modules
2594-----------------
2595
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002596- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2597 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2598 tp_as_number pointer.
2599
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002600- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2601 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2602 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2603 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2604 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2605
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002606- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2607
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002608- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2609
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002610- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002611 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002612 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2613 patch #678531.)
2614
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002615- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2616 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2617
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002618- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2619 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2620
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002621- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2622
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002623- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2624 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2625 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2626
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002627- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2628
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002629- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2630 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2631
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002632- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002633
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002634- datetime changes:
2635
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002636 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2637
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002638 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2639 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2640 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2641 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2642 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2643 now.
2644
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002645 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002646 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2647 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002648
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002649 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002650 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002651 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2652 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2653 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2654 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002655
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002656 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2657 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2658 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002659 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2660
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002661 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2662 by a later example coded by Guido.
2663
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002664 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002665 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2666 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2667 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002668 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2669 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2670
2671 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2672 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2673 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2674 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2675 tzinfo subclass instance.
2676
2677 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2678 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2679 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2680 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2681 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2682 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2683 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2684 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002685
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002686 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2687 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2688 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2689 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2690 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002691 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2692
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002693 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002694
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002695 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2696 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2697 as a naive datetime object.
2698
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002699 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2700 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2701 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2702
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002703 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2704 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2705 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2706 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2707 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2708 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2709 comparison.
2710
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002711 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2712 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2713 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2714 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002715 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002716
2717 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002718
2719 and ::
2720
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002721 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2722
2723 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2724 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2725 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2726 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2727
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002728 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2729 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2730 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2731 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2732 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2733
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002734 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2735 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002736 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2737 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002738
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002739Library
2740-------
2741
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002742- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2743 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2744
2745- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2746 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2747 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2748 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2749 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2750 See PEP 307 for details.
2751
2752- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2753 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2754
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002755- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2756 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002757 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002758 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2759 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002760 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002761
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002762- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2763 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2764
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002765- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2766 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2767 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2768
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002769- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2770
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002771- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2772 exception.
2773
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002774- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2775 class.
2776
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002777- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2778 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2779 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2780
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002781- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2782 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2783
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002784- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002785 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2786 See SF bug #659228.
2787
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002788- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2789 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2790 See SF patch #651082.
2791
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002792- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002793
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002794- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2795 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2796
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002797- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002798 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002799
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002800- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2801 DOS paths from other platforms.
2802
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002803Tools/Demos
2804-----------
2805
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002806- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2807 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2808 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2809 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2810 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2811 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2812 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2813 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2814 example:
2815
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002816 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2817 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002818
2819 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2820
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002821
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002822Build
2823-----
2824
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002825- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2826 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2827 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002828 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2829
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002830 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2831
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002832- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2833 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2834 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2835 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2836 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2837 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2838 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2839 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2840 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2841
2842- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2843 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2844 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2845 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2846
2847- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2848 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2849
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002850C API
2851-----
2852
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002853- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2854 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002855
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002856- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2857 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2858 tp_as_number pointer.
2859
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002860- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2861 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2862 (SF #681367)
2863
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002864- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2865 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2866 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2867 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002868
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002869Tests
2870-----
2871
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002872- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002873 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2874 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2875 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2876 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2877 pydoc.)
2878
2879- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2880
2881- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002882
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002883Windows
2884-------
2885
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002886- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2887 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2888 time).
2889
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002890- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2891 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2892
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002893- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2894 release without strong cryptography.
2895
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002896- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002897 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002898
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002899- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2900 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2901
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002902Mac
2903---
2904
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002905- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2906 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002907
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002908- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2909 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2910 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002911
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002912- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2913 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002914
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002915- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2916 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2917 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2918 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002919
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002920- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002921 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2922 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2923 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002924
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002925
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002926What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002927=================================
2928
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002929*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002930
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002931Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002932--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002933
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002934- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2935
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002936- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2937 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002938 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002939 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002940 a different meaning than before.
2941
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002942- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002943 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002944 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002945
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002946- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002947 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002948 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002949
2950- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2951 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2952 and deallocation.
2953
2954- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2955 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2956
2957- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2958 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2959 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2960 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2961 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2962
2963- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2964 now detected by the garbage collector.
2965
2966- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2967 [SF bug 519621]
2968
2969- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2970 identifier.
2971
2972- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2973 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2974 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2975 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2976 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2977 [SF bug 563060]
2978
2979- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2980 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2981 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2982 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2983 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2984
2985- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2986 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2987 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2988
2989- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2990
2991- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2992 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2993 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2994 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2995 state of the slots would be lost.)
2996
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002997Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002998-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002999
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003000- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003001 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3002 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3003 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3004 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003005 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3006 Jython 2.1.
3007
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003008- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003009 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003010 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3011 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3012 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3013 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3014 these, see PEP 302.
3015
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003016- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3017 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3018 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3019
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003020- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3021 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3022 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3023
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003024- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3025 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3026 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3027
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003028- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3029 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3030 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3031 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3032 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3033 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3034 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3035 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3036 releases or implementations.
3037
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003038- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003039 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3040 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003041
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003042- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3043 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3044
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003045- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3046 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3047 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3048
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003049- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3050 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3051
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003052- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3053 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003054 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3055 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003056
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003057- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3058 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3059 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3060 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3061 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3062
3063 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3064 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3065 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3066 pattern.
3067
3068 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3069 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3070 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3071 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3072
3073 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3074 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3075 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3076 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3077 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3078 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3079
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003080- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3081 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3082 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3083 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3084 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3085 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3086 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3087 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003088
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003089- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3090 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3091 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3092 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3093 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003094 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3095 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3096 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3097 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3098 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3099 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3100 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003101
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003102- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3103 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3104
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003105- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3106 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3107 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3108 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3109 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3110 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3111 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3112 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3113 to Zack Weinberg!
3114
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003115- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3116 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3117 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3118 type. This has been fixed now.
3119
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003120- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3121 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3122 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3123
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003124- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3125 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3126 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3127 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3128 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3129 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3130 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3131 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003132 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003133
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003134- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3135 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3136 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003137
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003138- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3139 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3140 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3141 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3142 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3143 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3144 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3145 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003146 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003147 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3148 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3149
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003150- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3151 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3152 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3153 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3154 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3155 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3156 this.)
3157
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003158- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3159 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003160 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003161 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003162 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3163 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003164 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3165 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003166
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003167- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3168 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3169 currently running.
3170
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003171- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3172 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3173 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3174 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3175
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003176- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3177 as directory names.
3178
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003179- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3180 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3181
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003182- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3183 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3184
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003185- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003186 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3187 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003188
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003189- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3190 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3191 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3192 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3193 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3194
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003195- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3196 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3197 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3198 removed.
3199
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003200- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3201 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3202 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3203
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003204- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3205 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3206 to __debug__.
3207
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003208- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3209 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3210 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3211
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003212- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3213 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3214 deprecated now.
3215
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003216- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3217 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3218 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003219
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003220- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3221 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3222 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3223 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3224 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003225
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003226- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3227 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3228
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003229- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3230 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3231 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003232 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003233 is backward compatible.
3234
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003235- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3236 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3237 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3238 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3239 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3240
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003241- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3242 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3243 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3244 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3245 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3246 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003247
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003248- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3249 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3250
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003251- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3252 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3253
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003254- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3255 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3256 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3257 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3258 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3259
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003260- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3261 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3262 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3263
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003264- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003265 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3266
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003267- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3268 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3269 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003270
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003271- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3272 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3273
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003274- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3275 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3276 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3277
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003278- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3279
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003280Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003281-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003282
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003283- Added three operators to the operator module:
3284 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3285 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3286 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3287
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003288- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3289
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003290- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3291 archives.
3292
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003293- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3294 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3295 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3296
3297 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3298
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003299- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3300 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3301 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003302 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003303
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003304- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3305 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3306 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3307 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003308 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3309 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3310 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3311 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003312
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003313- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3314 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003315
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003316- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3317
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003318- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3319 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3320
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003321- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3322 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3323 supported.
3324
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003325- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3326
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003327- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3328 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003329
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003330- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3331 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3332
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003333- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3334
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003335- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3336 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3337
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003338- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3339 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3340 functions but callable type objects.
3341
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003342- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003343 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003344 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003345
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003346- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3347 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003348
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003349- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3350 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003351
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003352- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3353 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3354 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3355 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3356
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003357- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3358 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003359
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003360- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3361 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3362 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3363 and __imul__.
3364
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003365- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003366 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3367 is called.
3368
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003369- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3370 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3371 interpreter was compiled.
3372
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003373- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3374 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3375 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003376 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003377 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3378 1, not 2.
3379
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003380- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3381 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3382 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3383 limit.
3384
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003385- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3386 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3387 bug #623464.
3388
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003389- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3390 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3391 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3392 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3393
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003394Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003395-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003396
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003397- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3398
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003399- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3400 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3401 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3402 with Python 2.3a2.
3403
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003404- os.path exposes getctime.
3405
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003406- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003407 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003408 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003409 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003410 unit tests of floating point results.
3411
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003412- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3413 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3414 has been increased.
3415
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003416- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3417 executed.
3418
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003419- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3420 postinstallation script.
3421
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003422- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3423 test the current module.
3424
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003425- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003426 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3427 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3428 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3429 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3430
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003431- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003432 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003433 Ward's Optik package.
3434
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003435- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3436 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3437 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3438 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3439
3440- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3441 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003442 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003443
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003444- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3445 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3446 shelf are binary pickles.
3447
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003448- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3449 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3450
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003451- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3452 modules are iterators now.
3453
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003454- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3455 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3456 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3457 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3458 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3459 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003460
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003461- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3462 with their entity value.
3463
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003464- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3465
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003466- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3467 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003468
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003469- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3470 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003471 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003472
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003473- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3474 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3475 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3476 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3477 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3478 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3479 main():
3480
3481 import locale
3482 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3483
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003484- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3485 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3486
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003487- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3488 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3489 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3490 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3491 to the new standard.
3492
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003493- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3494 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3495 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3496 an extension to the database.
3497
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003498- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3499 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3500 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3501 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003502 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003503
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003504- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003505 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003506
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003507- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3508 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3509 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3510 bounded integers.
3511
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003512- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3513 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3514 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3515 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3516 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3517 in existence.
3518
3519 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3520 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3521 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3522 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3523 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3524 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3525
3526 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3527 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3528 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3529 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3530
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003531- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3532 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3533 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3534
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003535- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3536
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003537- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3538 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3539 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3540 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3541
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003542- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3543 argument.
3544
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003545- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3546 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3547 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3548 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3549 [SF patch 560794].
3550
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003551- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3552 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3553 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003554 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3555 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3556 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003557
3558- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3559 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003560
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003561- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3562 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3563 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3564 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003565
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003566- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3567 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3568 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3569 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3570 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3571
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003572- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003573
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003574- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3575
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003576- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3577 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3578 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3579 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3580 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3581 identical to None.
3582
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003583- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3584 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3585 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3586 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3587 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3588 results now.
3589
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003590- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3591 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3592
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003593- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3594 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3595 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3596 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3597 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3598 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3599 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3600 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3601
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003602- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3603
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003604- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3605 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3606
3607- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3608 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3609 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3610 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3611 and other systems.
3612
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003613- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3614 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3615 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3616 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 +00003617 work well with these.
3618
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003619- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3620
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003621- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003622 connections.
3623
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003624- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3625 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3626 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3627
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003628- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3629 sets
3630
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003631- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3632 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3633 name.
3634
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003635- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3636 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3637 passed in.
3638
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003639- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003640 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003641 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3642 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003643
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003644- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3645
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003646- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3647
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003648- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3649 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3650 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3651
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003652- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3653 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3654 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3655 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003656 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003657
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003658- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003659 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003660 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003661
3662- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3663 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3664 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3665
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003666- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003667 the value of its expression argument.
3668
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003669- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3670 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3671 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3672
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003673- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3674 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3675 skipstone browser was included.
3676
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003677- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3678 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3679
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003680Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003681-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003682
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003683- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3684 names in addition to accepting file names.
3685
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003686- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3687 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3688 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3689 still used and useful.)
3690
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003691- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3692 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3693 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3694 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003695
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003696- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3697 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3698 the generated binary.
3699
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003700Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003701-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003702
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003703- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3704
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003705- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3706 except in the hands of experts.
3707
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003708- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003709 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3710 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3711 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003712
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003713- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3714 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3715 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3716 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3717 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3718 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3719 builds.
3720
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003721- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3722 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3723 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3724 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3725 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3726 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3727 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3728 new type.
3729
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003730- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003731
3732 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3733 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3734 positive infinities.
3735
3736 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3737 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3738 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3739 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3740 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3741 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3742 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3743
3744 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3745
3746 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3747
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003748- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3749 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3750 size of the executable.
3751
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003752- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3753 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3754 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3755 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003756
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003757- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3758
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003759- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3760 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3761 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003762
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003763- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3764 well as Unix.
3765
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003766- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3767 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3768 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3769 modules in the README file for details.
3770
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003771C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003772-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003773
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003774- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3775 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003776 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003777 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003778 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003779
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003780- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3781 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3782 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3783 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3784 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3785 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003786 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003787 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3788 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3789 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3790 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3791 aligned.)
3792
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003793- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3794 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3795 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3796
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003797- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3798 level.
3799
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003800- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3801 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3802 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3803 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3804 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3805
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003806- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3807 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3808 code.
3809
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003810- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3811 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3812 adjusting for negative indices.
3813
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003814- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3815 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3816 object.
3817
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003818- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3819 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3820 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3821
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003822- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3823 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003824
3825- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3826
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003827- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3828 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3829 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3830 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3831
3832- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3833
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003834- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003835
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003836- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003837 without going through the buffer API.
3838
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003839- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003840
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003841- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3842 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3843 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3844 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3845
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003846- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3847 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3848
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003849- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003850 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3851
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003852New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003853-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003854
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003855- OpenVMS is now supported.
3856
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003857- AtheOS is now supported.
3858
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003859- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3860
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003861- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3862
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003863Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003864-----
3865
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003866- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3867 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3868 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003869
3870Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003871-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003872
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003873- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3874 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3875 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3876 bugs.
3877 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003878 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003879 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3880 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003881 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003882
3883- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003884 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003885
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003886- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3887 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3888
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003889- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3890 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003891 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003892 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3893
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003894- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3895 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3896 use files" uninstall option).
3897
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003898- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3899
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003900- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3901 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3902
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003903- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3904 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3905 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3906
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003907- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3908 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3909 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3910 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3911 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003912 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3913 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3914 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003915
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003916- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003917 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003918 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3919 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3920 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3921 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3922 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3923 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3924 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3925 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3926 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3927 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3928 work around.
3929
3930- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3931 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3932 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3933 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3934 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3935 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3936 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3937 specified with O_CREAT too).
3938
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003939Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003940----
3941
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003942- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003943
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003944- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3945 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3946 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3947
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003948- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3949 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3950 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3951
3952- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3953 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3954 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3955 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3956 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3957 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3958 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3959 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003960
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003961- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3962 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3963 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003964
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003965- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3966 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3967 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3968 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3969 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003970
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003971- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3972 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3973 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003974
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003975- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3976 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003977
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003978- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3979 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3980 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3981 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3982 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003983
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003984- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3985 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3986 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3987
3988- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3989 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3990 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003991
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003992- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3993 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3994 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3995 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003996 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003997
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003998- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3999 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004000
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004001- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4002 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004003
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004004- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004005 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004006 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4007 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004008
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004009
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004010What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004011===============================
4012
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004013*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4014
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004015Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004016--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004017
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004018- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4019 with a custom metaclass.
4020
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004021Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004022-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004023
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004024- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4025 are proxies.
4026
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004027Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004028-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004029
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004030- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4031 very short strings.
4032
4033- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4034 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4035 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4036 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4037 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4038
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004039Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004040-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004041
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004042- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4043 close or delete time).
4044
4045- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4046 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4047
4048- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4049
4050- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004051 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004052
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004053Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004054-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004055
4056Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004057-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004058
4059C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004060-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004061
4062New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004063-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004064
4065Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004066-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004067
4068Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004069-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004070
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004071- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4072
4073- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4074 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4075
4076- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4077 deleted at process exit time.
4078
4079- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4080 in backslash.
4081
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004082Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004083----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004084
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004085- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4086 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4087 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4088
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004089
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004090What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004091===========================
4092
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004093*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4094
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004095Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004096--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004097
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004098- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4099 been extensively updated. See
4100
4101 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4102
4103 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4104
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004105- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4106 deleted!
4107
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004108- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4109 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4110 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4111 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4112 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4113
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004114- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4115
4116 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4117 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4118
4119 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4120 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4121 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4122 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4123 supported anyway.
4124
4125 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4126 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4127
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004128- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4129 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4130 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4131 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4132 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004133
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004134- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4135 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4136 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4137
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004138Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004139-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004140
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004141- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4142 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4143 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4144 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4145 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4146 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004147 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4148 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4149 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4150 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004151
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004152- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4153 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4154 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4155
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004156Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004157-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004158
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004159- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4160
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004161Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004162-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004163
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004164- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4165 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4166 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4167 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4168 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4169 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4170
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004171- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4172
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004173- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4174
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004175- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4176
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004177- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4178 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4179 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4180
4181- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4182
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004183Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004184-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004185
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004186- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4187 off a search on Google.
4188
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004189Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004190-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004191
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004192- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4193 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4194 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4195 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4196 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4197 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4198 other platforms should do likewise.
4199
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004200- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4201 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4202 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4203
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004204C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004205-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004206
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004207- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4208 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4209 producing key-value pairs.
4210
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004211- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004212 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004213 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4214 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4215 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4216 previously went unchallenged.
4217
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004218New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004219-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004220
4221Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004222-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004223
4224Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004225-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004226
4227Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004228----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004229
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004230- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4231 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004232
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004233- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4234 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4235 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4236 home.
4237
4238
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004239What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004240===========================
4241
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004242*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4243
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004244Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004245--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004246
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004247- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4248 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004249
4250 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004251 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004252
4253 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4254 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004255 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004256 This needs to be documented.
4257
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004258- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4259 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4260
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004261- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4262 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4263 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4264
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004265- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4266 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4267
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004268- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4269 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4270 class forbids it).
4271
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004272- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4273 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4274 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4275
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004276- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4277
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004278Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004280
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004281- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4282 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004283 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004284
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004285- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4286 (like 1 + '').
4287
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004288Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004289-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004290
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004291- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4292 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4293 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4294 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004295 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004296 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4297
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004298- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4299 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4300 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4301 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4302
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004303- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4304 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004305 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4306 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4307 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004308
4309- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4310 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004311
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004312- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4313 bytes on its input.
4314
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004315Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004316-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004317
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004318- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004319 convenience function.
4320
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004321- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4322 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4323 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004324 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4325 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4326 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4327 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4328 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4329 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004330
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004331- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4332 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4333 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4334 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4335
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004336- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4337 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4338 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4339
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004340- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4341 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4342 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4343 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4344
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004345- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4346 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004347 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004348 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4349 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4350 new -l and -e options.
4351
4352- statcache is now deprecated.
4353
4354- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4355 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004356 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004357 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4358 time properly taken into account.
4359
4360- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4361 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4362 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4363 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4364
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004365Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004366-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004367
4368Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004369-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004370
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004371- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4372 is built with libdb3 if available.
4373
4374- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4375
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004376C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004377-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004378
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004379- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4380 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4381 PySequence_Size().
4382
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004383- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4384
4385- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4386 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4387 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4388
4389- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4390 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4391
4392- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4393 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4394
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004395New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004396-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004397
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004398- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4399 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4400
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004401- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4402 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4403
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004404- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4405
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004406Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004407-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004408
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004409- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4410 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4411
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004412Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004413-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004414
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004415Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004416----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004417
4418- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4419 removed completely in the next release.
4420
4421- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4422 OSX.
4423
4424- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4425 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4426
4427- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4428
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004429
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004430What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004431===========================
4432
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004433*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4434
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004435Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004436--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004437
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004438- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004439 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004440 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004441 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4442 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004443 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4444 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004445 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4446 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004447
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004448- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4449 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4450
4451- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4452 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4453
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004454Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004455-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004456
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004457- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4458 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4459 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4460 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4461 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4462 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4463 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4464 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4465
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004466- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4467 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4468 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4469 example).
4470
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004471- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004472 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004473 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004474 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004475
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004476- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4477 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4478 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004479 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004480
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004481- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4482 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4483 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4484 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4485 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4486 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4487
4488 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4489
4490 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4491
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004492Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004493-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004494
4495- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4496
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004497- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4498
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004499- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4500 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004501
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004502- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4503 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4504 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4505 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4506 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4507 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004508 attributes.
4509
4510- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4511 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4512 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004513
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004514- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4515 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4516 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004517
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004518- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4519 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4520 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004521 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4522 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4523
4524- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4525 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004526
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004527Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004528-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004529
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004530- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4531 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4532
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004533- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4534 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4535 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4536 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4537
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004538- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4539 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4540 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4541 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4542
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004543 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4544 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4545 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4546 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4547 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4548 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4549 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4550 without losing information).
4551
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004552- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004553 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4554 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4555 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4556 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4557 module).
4558
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004559 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004560 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4561 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4562 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4563 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004564
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004565- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004566 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4567 encoding.
4568
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004569- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4570 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4571
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004572- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004573 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4574
4575- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4576 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4577 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4578 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4579
4580- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4581
4582- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4583 ON, and OFF.
4584
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004585- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4586 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4587
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004588Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004589-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004590
4591- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4592 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4593 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004594
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004595- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4596 been added: -X and -E.
4597
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004598Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004599-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004600
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004601- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4602 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4603
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004604C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004605-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004606
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004607- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4608 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4609 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4610 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4611 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4612
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004613- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4614 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4615 as long) arguments.
4616
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004617- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4618 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4619 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4620 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4621 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4622 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4623
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004624- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4625 input.
4626
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004627New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004628-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004629
4630Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004631-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004632
4633Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004634-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004635
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004636- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4637 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4638 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4639
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004640- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4641 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4642 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004643 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004644
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004645 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4646 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4647 import signal
4648 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004649
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004650 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004651 while 1:
4652 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004653 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004654 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4655 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4656 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4657 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004658
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004659
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004660What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4661===========================
4662
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004663*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4664
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004665Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004666--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004667
4668- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4669 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4670 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4671
4672- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4673 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4674 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4675 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4676 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4677 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4678 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004679
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004680- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004681 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004682 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4683 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4684 associate a docstring with a property.
4685
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004686- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4687 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4688 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4689 other built-in object types.
4690
4691- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4692 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4693 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4694 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4695 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4696
4697- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4698 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4699
4700- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4701 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004702 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004703 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4704 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4705 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4706 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4707 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4708
4709- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4710 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4711 class.
4712
4713- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4714 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4715 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4716 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4717
4718- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4719 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4720 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4721 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4722
4723- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4724 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4725
4726- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4727 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4728 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4729 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4730 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004731 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004732 with the same value as s.
4733
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004734- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4735
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004736Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004737----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004738
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004739- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4740
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004741- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4742 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4743 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4744 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4745 objects.
4746
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004747- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4748 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004749 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4750 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4751
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004752- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4753 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4754 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4755
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004756Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004757-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004758
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004759- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4760 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4761 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4762 by the instances.
4763
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004764- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4765 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4766 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4767
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004768- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4769 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4770 before the entire comparison is complete.
4771
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004772- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4773 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4774 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4775
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004776- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4777 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4778 getwriter().
4779
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004780- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4781 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4782
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004783- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004784 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4785 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4786
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004787- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4788 iterable object.
4789
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004790- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4791 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004792
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004793- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4794 authentication.
4795
4796- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4797 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004798
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004799- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004800 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4801 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4802 a sample driver.)
4803
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004804Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004805-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004806
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004807- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4808 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4809 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4810 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4811 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4812 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4813 kernel has large file support.
4814
4815- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4816 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4817 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4818 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4819 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4820
4821- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4822 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4823 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4824
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004825C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004826-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004827
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004828- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4829 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4830
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004831New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004832-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004833
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004834- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4835 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4836
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004837Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004838-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004839
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004840- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4841 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4842 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4843 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4844 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4845
4846- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4847 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4848 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4849 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4850
4851- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4852 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4853
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004854Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004855-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004856
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004857- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004858 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4859 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004860
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004861
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004862What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4863===========================
4864
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4866
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004867Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004868----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004869
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004870- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4871 big to represent as a C double.
4872
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004873- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4874 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4875 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4876 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4877 restriction).
4878
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004879- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4880 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4881 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4882 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4883 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4884
4885 >>> dir([])
4886 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4887 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4888 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4889 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4890 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4891 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4892 'reverse', 'sort']
4893
4894 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4895
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004896- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004897 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4898 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4899 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4900 OverflowError exception.
4901
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004902- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004903 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004904 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4905 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4906 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4907 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4908 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004909 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004910 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4911 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4912
4913 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4914 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4915 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4916 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004917
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004918- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004919 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4920 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4921 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4922 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4923 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4924 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4925 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4926 once it is created.
4927
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004928- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4929 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4930 (key, value) pairs.
4931
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004932- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004933 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4934 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4935
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004936- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4937 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4938 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4939 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4940 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004941
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004942- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004943 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4944 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4945
4946 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4947
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004948- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004949 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4950
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004951Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004952-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004953
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004954- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004955 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4956 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004957
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004958- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4959 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4960 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4961 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4962 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4963 in this area anymore).
4964
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004965- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4966 threading.Timer.
4967
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004968- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4969 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4970
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004971- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004972 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4973
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004974- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004975 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4976 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4977 converted to Python longs.
4978
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004979- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004980 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4981
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004982- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4983 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4984 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4985
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004986Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004987-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004988
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004989- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4990 division operators as per PEP 238.
4991
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004992Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004993-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004994
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004995- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4996 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4997 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4998 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4999
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005000C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005001-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005002
5003- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005004
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005005- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5006 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005007 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005008
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005009 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5010 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005011 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005012 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005013
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005014- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005015 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5016 module:
5017
5018 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005019
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005020 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5021 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005022
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005023 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5024 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005025
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005026 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5027
5028 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5029
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005030- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005031 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5032 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5033 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005034
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005035New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005036-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005037
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005038- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5039 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5040 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5041 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5042 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005043
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005044Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005045-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005046
5047Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005048-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005049
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005050- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5051 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5052 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5053 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005054 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5055 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5056 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5057 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5058 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005059
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005060- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005061 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5062
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005063
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005064What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5065===========================
5066
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005067*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5068
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005069Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005070-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005071
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005072- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5073 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5074
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005075- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5076 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5077 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005078
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005079- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5080 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5081 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5082 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005083
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005084- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5085
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005086- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005087
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005088Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005089-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005090
5091- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005092 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005093 the module docstring for details.
5094
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005095Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005096-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005097
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005098- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005099 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5100 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5101 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005102
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005103- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5104 Nick Mathewson.
5105
5106Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005107----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005108
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005109- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5110 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5111 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5112 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5113 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5114 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5115 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5116 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5117
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005118- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5119 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5120 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5121 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5122
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005123- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5124 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5125 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5126 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5127 come a long way).
5128
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005129- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5130 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5131 write filters for these warnings).
5132
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005133- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5134 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5135 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5136 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5137 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5138
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005139- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5140 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5141 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5142 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5143 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5144 older distribution.
5145
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005146Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005147-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005148
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005149- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5150 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005151 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005152
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005153- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5154 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5155 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5156
5157- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5158
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005159- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5160
5161- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5162
5163- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5164
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005165- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005166
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005167- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5168
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005169New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005170-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005171
5172C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005173-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005174
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005175- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5176 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5177 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5178 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5179 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5180 against buffer overruns.
5181
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005182- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005183 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5184 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005185 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5186 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5187 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5188
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005189- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5190 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5191 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5192 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5193 deprecated.
5194
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005195Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005196-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005197
5198- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5199 relevant is found.
5200
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005201
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005202What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005203===========================
5204
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005205*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5206
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005207Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005208----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005209
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005210- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5211 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5212 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5213 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5214 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5215 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5216 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5217 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005218 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005219 repaired.
5220
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005221- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005222 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005223 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5224 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5225 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5226 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5227 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5228 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5229 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5230 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5231
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005232- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5233 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5234 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5235 leading BMO character).
5236
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005237- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5238 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5239 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5240
5241 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5242 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5243 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005244
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005245 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5246 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5247 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5248 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5249 for various simple to use conversions.
5250
5251 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5252 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5253
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005254 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5255 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5256 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5257 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5258 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5259 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5260 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5261 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5262 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5263 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5264 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5265 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5266 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5267 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5268 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005269
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005270- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5271 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5272 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005273 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005274 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005275
5276 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005277 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5278 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5279 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5280 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5281 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005282 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5283 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005284
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005285 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5286 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5287 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005288 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005289
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005290- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5291 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5292 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5293 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5294 floating arithmetic,
5295
5296 x = 9007199254740992.0
5297 print long(x)
5298
5299 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5300 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5301 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5302 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5303 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5304 functions are of good quality).
5305
5306 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5307 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5308 algorithms to break.
5309
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005310- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5311 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5312 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5313 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5314 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5315 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5316 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5317 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5318 order.
5319
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005320- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5321 operation along the most common code paths.
5322
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005323- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5324 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5325
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005326- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5327 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5328 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5329 {}.update(UserDict())
5330
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005331- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5332 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5333 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5334 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5335 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5336 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5337 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5338 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5339
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005340- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005341 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005342
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005343 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005344 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5345 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005346 join() method of strings
5347 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005348 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5349 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005350 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005351 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005352
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005353- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5354 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5355
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005356- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5357 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5358
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005359- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5360 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5361 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5362 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5363
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005364- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5365 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005366 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005367 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5368 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005369
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005370- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5371
5372
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005373Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005374-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005375
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005376- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005377 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005378 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5379 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5380
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005381- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5382 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5383
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005384- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5385 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5386 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5387 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5388
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005389- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5390 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5391 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5392
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005393- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5394
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005395- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5396
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005397- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5398 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5399 that are still imported into string.py).
5400
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005401- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5402
5403- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5404 Now it does.
5405
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005406- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5407
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005408- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5409 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5410 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5411 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5412 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005413 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5414 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005415
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005416- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5417 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5418 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5419 'help(object)'.
5420
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005421Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005422-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005423
5424- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005425 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005426 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5427 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5428
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005429- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005430 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5431 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005432
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005433C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005434-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005435
5436- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5437 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005438
5439----
5440
5441**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**