blob: 9a63f2103812dccc1989dc27f4f5fa3217a8d5e0 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000013- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
14
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000015- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
16 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error)
17
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000018- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
19
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000020- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
21 returning None.
22
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000023- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
24 ('\') with a specific error message.
25
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000026- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
27
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000028- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
29 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
30
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000031- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000032 an ferror() call.
33
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000034- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
35 list.sort().
36
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000037- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
38 (2+3) --> (5).
39
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000040- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
41
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000042- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
43 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000044
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000045- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
46 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
47 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
48
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000049Extension Modules
50-----------------
51
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +000052- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
53
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +000054- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
55 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
56 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
57
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +000058- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
59
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +000060- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
61 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
62
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +000063- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
64 file size.
65
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000066- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
67
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000068- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
69 {remove_history,replace_history}
70
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000071- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
72 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000073
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000074- stat_float_times is now True.
75
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000076- array.array objects are now picklable.
77
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000078- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
79 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
80
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000081- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
82 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
83 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
84
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000085- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
86 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000087
88Library
89-------
90
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +000091- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
92 files to PyPI.
93
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +000094- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
95 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
96 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
97 work as expected.
98
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +000099- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
100 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
101
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000102- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
103 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
104
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000105- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
106
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000107- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
108 to build.
109
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000110- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
111 symbolic links on Windows.
112
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000113- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
114 profile.py if available.
115
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000116- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
117
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000118- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
119 in LWPCookieJar.
120
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000121- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
122
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000123- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
124
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000125- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
126
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000127- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
128
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000129- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
130
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000131- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
132
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000133- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
134
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000135- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
136
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000137- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
138 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
139 be exploited in various ways.
140
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000141- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
142
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000143- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
144
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000145- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
146
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000147- Enhancements to the csv module:
148
149 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
150 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
151 PEP 305.
152 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
153 reporting.
154 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
155 dictates.
156 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000157 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000158 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000159 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
160 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000161 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
162 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000163 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000164 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
165 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
166 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
167 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
168 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
169 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
170 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
171 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
172 without first creating a dialect class.
173 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
174 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
175 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000176 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000177 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
178 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000179 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
180 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
181 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
182 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000183 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
184 This has been fixed.
185
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000186- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
187 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
188 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
189 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
190
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000191- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
192
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000193- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
194 (Bug #951915).
195
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000196- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
197 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
198 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
199 encoding alias table
200
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000201- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
202
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000203- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
204 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
205
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000206- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
207
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000208- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
209
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000210- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
211
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000212- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
213
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000214- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
215
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000216- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
217 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
218 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
219
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000220- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000221 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000222
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000223- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
224 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
225 tokenizer with very long source lines.
226
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000227- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
228 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
229
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000230- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
231 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000232
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000233- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
234 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
235
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000236- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
237 correctly.
238
239
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000240Build
241-----
242
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000243- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
244
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000245- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
246 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
247
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000248- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
249 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
250 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
251 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
252 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
253 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
254 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
255 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
256
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000257- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
258 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
259 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
260 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
261
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000262
263C API
264-----
265
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000266- Removed PyRange_New().
267
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000268
269Tests
270-----
271
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000272- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000273
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000274
275Documentation
276-------------
277
278- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
279 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
280 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
281
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000282Mac
283---
284
285
286
287Tools/Demos
288-----------
289
290
291
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000292What's New in Python 2.4 final?
293===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000294
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000295*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000296
297Core and builtins
298-----------------
299
300- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
301 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
302 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
303
304
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000305What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
306==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000307
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000308*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000309
310Core and builtins
311-----------------
312
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000313- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
314 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
315 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
316
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000317
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000318Library
319-------
320
321- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
322 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
323 raised is re-raised.
324
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000325- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
326 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
327
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000328- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
329 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
330 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
331 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
332 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
333 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
334 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
335 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
336 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
337 by the slice are recomputed now.
338
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000339- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000340
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000341Build
342-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000343
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000344- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
345 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
346 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000347
348C API
349-----
350
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000351- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
352
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000353
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000354What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
355================================
356
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000357*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000358
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000359License
360-------
361
362The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
363is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
364changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
365Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
366intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
367durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
368the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
369License::
370
371 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
372
373says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
374to Python 2.1.1.
375
376The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
377License Version 2.
378
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000379Core and builtins
380-----------------
381
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000382- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
383 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
384 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
385 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
386 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
387 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
388 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
389 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
390 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
391 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
392
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000393- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000394
395Extension Modules
396-----------------
397
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000398- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
399 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
400 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
401 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000402
403Library
404-------
405
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000406- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
407 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
408 returned.
409
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000410- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
411
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000412- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
413 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
414
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000415- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
416
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000417- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
418 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000419
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000420- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
421
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000422- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
423
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000424- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000425 the source code is updated and reloaded.
426
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000427Build
428-----
429
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000430- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000431
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000432What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
433================================
434
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000435*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000436
437Core and builtins
438-----------------
439
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000440- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000441 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
442
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000443- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
444 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
445 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
446 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
447
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000448- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
449 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
450
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000451- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
452 constant.
453
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000454- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
455 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
456 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
457 large), and to anomalies such as
458 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
459 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
460 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
461 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000462
463Extension modules
464-----------------
465
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000466- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
467 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000468 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
469 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
470 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000471
472Library
473-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000474
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000475- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000476 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000477 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
478 --swig-cpp.
479
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000480- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
481 it is set.
482
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000483- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000484
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000485- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
486 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
487 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
488 Closes bug #1039270.
489
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000490- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000491
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000492 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000493 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
494 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
495 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
496 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
497 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
498 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
499 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
500 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
501 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
502 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
503 + Updates to documentation.
504
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000505- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
506 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
507 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
508 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
509
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000510- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000511
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000512- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
513 applications should use the getmember function.
514
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000515- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
516
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000517- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
518 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
519 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
520 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
521 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
522 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
523 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
524 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
525 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
526
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000527- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
528 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000529 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000530
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000531- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
532 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
533 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
534 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
535 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
536 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
537 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
538 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000539
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000540- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
541 the new public features (of which there are many).
542
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000543- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000544 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
545 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
546 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
547 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000548 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000549
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000550- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
551
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000552- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
553 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
554 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
555 options.
556
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000557- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
558 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
559 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
560 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
561 conditions under which non-string values work.
562
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000563Build
564-----
565
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000566- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
567 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
568 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
569
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000570- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
571 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
572 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
573 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
574 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000575
576C API
577-----
578
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000579- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
580 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
581
582- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
583
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000584- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
585 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
586 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
587 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
588 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
589 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
590 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
591 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
592 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
593
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000594- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
595
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000596- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
597 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
598 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000599
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000600Tests
601-----
602
603- test__locale ported to unittest
604
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000605Mac
606---
607
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000608- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
609 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
610 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000611
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000612Tools/Demos
613-----------
614
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000615- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
616 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
617 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
618 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
619 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000620
621
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000622What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
623=================================
624
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000625*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000626
627Core and builtins
628-----------------
629
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000630- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000631 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
632
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000633- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
634 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
635 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
636 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
637 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
638 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
639 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
640 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000641 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
642 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
643 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
644 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
645 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000646
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000647- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
648 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
649 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
650 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
651 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
652
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000653- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
654
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000655- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
656 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
657
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000658- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
659 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
660 modified the list.
661
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000662- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
663 functions is now writable.
664
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000665- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
666 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
667 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
668 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
669
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000670- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
671 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
672 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
673 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
674 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000675
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000676- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
677 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
678
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000679Extension modules
680-----------------
681
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000682- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
683
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000684- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
685 data.
686
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000687- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
688 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
689 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
690 supposed to have been truncated away.
691
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000692- Added socket.socketpair().
693
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000694- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
695 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
696
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000697- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000698 versions of Python, have now been removed.
699
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000700Library
701-------
702
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000703- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000704 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000705
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000706- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
707 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
708
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000709- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
710 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
711
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000712- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
713
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000714- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
715 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000716
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000717- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
718 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
719
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000720- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
721
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000722- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
723
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000724- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
725
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000726- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
727 Percivall.
728
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000729- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
730 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
731
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000732- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
733 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
734 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000735 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000736
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000737- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
738 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
739 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
740 and exponent.
741
742- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
743
744- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
745 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
746 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
747
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000748- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
749 to the readline module.
750
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000751- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000752 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
753 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000754
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000755- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
756 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
757 contains symlinks.
758
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000759- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
760 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
761
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000762- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
763 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
764 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
765
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000766- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
767 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
768 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
769 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
770 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
771 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
772 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
773 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
774 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
775 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
776 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
777 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
778 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
779
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000780- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
781
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000782Tools/Demos
783-----------
784
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000785- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
786 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
787
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000788- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
789
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000790Build
791-----
792
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000793- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
794 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
795 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
796 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
797 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
798 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
799 plans to do so.
800
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000801- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
802 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
803
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000804- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
805 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
806
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000807- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
808 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
809
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000810- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
811 GNU/k*BSD systems.
812
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000813- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
814 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
815
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000816C API
817-----
818
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000819..
820
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000821Documentation
822-------------
823
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000824- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
825 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
826
827- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
828 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
829 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000830
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000831New platforms
832-------------
833
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000834- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
835
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000836Tests
837-----
838
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000839..
840
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000841Windows
842-------
843
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000844- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
845 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
846 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
847 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
848 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
849 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
850 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
851 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
852 the problem.
853
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000854Mac
855---
856
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000857..
858
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000859
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000860What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
861=================================
862
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000863*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000864
865Core and builtins
866-----------------
867
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000868- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
869 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
870 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
871 sensitive code.
872
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000873- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000874 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000875
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000876 @staticmethod
877 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000878
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000879 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000880
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000881- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
882 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
883 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
884 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
885 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
886 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
887 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
888 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
889 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
890 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
891 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
892
893 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
894 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
895 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
896 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
897 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
898 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
899 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
900
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000901- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
902 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
903
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000904- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000905 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000906
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000907- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000908 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000909 which was missing for no apparent reason.
910
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000911- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000912 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
913 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
914
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000915- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
916 types that support garbage collection.
917
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000918- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
919
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000920- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
921 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
922 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
923 Jython.
924
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000925- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
926
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000927- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
928 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
929
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000930- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
931 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
932 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000933
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000934- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
935 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
936 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
937
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000938Extension modules
939-----------------
940
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000941- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
942
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000943Library
944-------
945
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000946- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
947 TIS-620
948
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000949- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
950 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
951 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
952 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
953 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
954 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
955 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
956 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
957 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
958 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
959
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000960- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
961
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000962- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
963 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
964 same as when the argument is omitted).
965 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
966
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000967- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
968
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000969- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
970 schemes are offered.
971
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000972- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
973
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000974- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
975 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
976 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
977
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000978- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
979
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000980- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
981 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
982
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000983- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
984 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
985 when dummy_threading is being used.
986
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000987- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
988 from a tarfile.
989
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000990- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000991 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000992
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000993- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
994 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
995 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
996 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
997
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000998- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
999 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1000
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001001- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1002 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1003 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1004 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1005 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1006 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1007 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1008 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1009 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1010 by some other method in progress).
1011
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001012- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1013 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1014 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001015
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001016- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1017
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001018- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1019 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1020 AM Kuchling.
1021
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001022- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1023 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1024 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1025
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001026- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1027 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1028 instead of unsigned.
1029
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001030- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001031 no longer part of the public API.
1032
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001033- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1034 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1035 string methods of the same name).
1036
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001037- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001038 SF patch 945642.
1039
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001040- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1041
1042 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1043
1044 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1045 DocTestSuites.
1046
1047- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1048 that provide thread-local data.
1049
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001050- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1051 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1052
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001053- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1054
1055- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1056 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1057 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1058
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001059- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1060
1061 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1062 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1063 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001064
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001065 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1066 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1067 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1068 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1069
1070 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1071 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1072
1073 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1074 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1075 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1076 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1077
1078 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1079 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1080 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1081 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1082 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1083
1084 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1085 wrapping help output.
1086
1087 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1088 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1089 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001090
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001091C API
1092-----
1093
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001094- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1095 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1096 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1097 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1098 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1099 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1100 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1101 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1102 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1103 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1104 its visible semantics have not changed.
1105
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001106- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1107 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1108
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001109Documentation
1110-------------
1111
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001112- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001113
1114 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001115 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001116
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001117 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001118
1119 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1120
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001121- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001122
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001123Tests
1124-----
1125
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001126- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001127 platforms that use the Makefile.
1128
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001129- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1130 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1131 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1132
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001133
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001134What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1135=================================
1136
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001137*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001138
1139Core and builtins
1140-----------------
1141
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001142- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1143 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1144 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1145 objects now (one object instead of three).
1146
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001147- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1148 Windows DLLs.
1149
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001150- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1151 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001152
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001153- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1154 a new .pyc magic.
1155
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001156- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1157 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1158 be there.
1159
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001160- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1161 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1162 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1163
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001164- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1165 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1166 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1167
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001168- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1169
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001170- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1171 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1172 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001173
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001174- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1175 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1176
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001177- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1178
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001179- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001180 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001181
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001182- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1183
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001184- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1185
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001186- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1187 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1188
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001189- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1190 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1191 Fixes bug #858016 .
1192
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001193- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1194 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1195 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1196
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001197- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1198 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1199 improves their performance (about 35%).
1200
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001201- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1202 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1203 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1204
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001205- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1206 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1207 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1208 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1209
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001210- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1211 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001212 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001213 length is not known).
1214
1215- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1216 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001217 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1218 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001219 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1220
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001221- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1222 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1223
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001224- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1225 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1226 keyword arguments.
1227
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001228- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1229 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1230 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1231
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001232- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1233 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1234 cases.
1235
1236- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1237 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1238 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1239 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1240 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1241 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1242 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1243 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1244 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1245 a release build.
1246
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001247- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1248 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1249
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001250- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001251 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001252
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001253- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1254 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1255 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1256 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1257 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1258 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1259 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1260 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1261 destroyed.
1262
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001263- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1264 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1265 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1266 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1267 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1268 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1269 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1270 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1271
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001272- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1273 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1274 character other than a space.
1275
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001276- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1277 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1278 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1279 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1280 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1281 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1282 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1283 attributes with the same name.
1284
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001285- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1286 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1287 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1288 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1289 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1290 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1291 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1292 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1293 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1294 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1295 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1296 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1297 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1298 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001299
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001300- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1301 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1302 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1303 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1304 This has been repaired.
1305
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001306- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1307
1308- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1309
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001310- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1311 over a sequence.
1312
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001313- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001314 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001315
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001316- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1317
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001318- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1319 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1320 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1321 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1322 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1323 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1324 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1325 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1326
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001327- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1328 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1329 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1330
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001331- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1332 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1333 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1334 freelist.
1335
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001336- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1337 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1338
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001339- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1340 number.
1341
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001342- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1343 a TypeError exception.
1344
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001345- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1346 820195.
1347
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001348- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1349 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1350 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1351
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001352- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001353 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1354 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001355
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001356- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1357 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1358 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1359
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001360- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1361 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001362 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001363
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001364- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001365 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1366 the first call.
1367
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001368
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001369Extension modules
1370-----------------
1371
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001372- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1373 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1374
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001375- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1376 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1377 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1378 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1379 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1380 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1381 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001382
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001383- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1384
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001385- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1386
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001387- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1388 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1389
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001390- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1391 fewer false positives.
1392
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001393- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1394 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1395
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001396- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001397 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1398
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001399- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001400 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001401 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001402 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1403 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001404
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001405- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1406 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1407 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1408 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1409
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001410- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1411 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1412 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1413 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1414 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1415 #897625.
1416
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001417- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1418 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1419
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001420- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1421 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1422 and pops on either side of the deque.
1423
1424- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1425 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1426
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001427- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1428 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1429 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1430 other functions that expect a function argument.
1431
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001432- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1433
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001434- os.getsid was added.
1435
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001436- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1437 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1438 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1439
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001440- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1441
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001442- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1443
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001444- readline.clear_history was added.
1445
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001446- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1447
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001448- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1449
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001450- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1451
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001452- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1453
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001454- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1455
1456- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1457
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001458- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1459
1460- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1461
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001462- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1463 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1464 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1465
1466- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1467 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1468 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1469 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1470 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1471 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1472 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1473
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001474- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1475 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1476 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1477 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001478
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001479- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001480 iterators from a single iterable.
1481
1482- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1483 of raising a TypeError exception.
1484
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001485- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1486 as parameter.
1487
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001488Library
1489-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001490
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001491- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1492 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1493 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001494
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001495- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1496 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1497 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001498
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001499- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001500
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001501- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1502 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001503
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001504- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1505 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1506
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001507- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1508
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001509- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001510 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001511
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001512- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001513 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001514
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001515- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1516
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001517- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1518 on cygwin and mingw32.
1519
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001520- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1521
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001522- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1523 module.
1524
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001525- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1526 installation scheme for all platforms.
1527
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001528- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001529 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001530
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001531- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1532 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1533 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1534
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001535- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1536 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1537 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1538
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001539- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1540
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001541- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1542
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001543- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1544 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1545
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001546- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1547 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1548 type pattern with the same value exists.
1549
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001550- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1551 when run from the command prompt).
1552
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001553- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1554 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1555
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001556- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1557 default sort).
1558
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001559- Added global runctx function to profile module
1560
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001561- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1562
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001563- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1564
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001565- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1566
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001567- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001568 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1569 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1570 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1571 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1572 accordingly.
1573
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001574- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1575 decoding standards.
1576
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001577- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1578 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1579 called for all requests.
1580
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001581- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1582 they are passed to the compiler.
1583
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001584- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1585 indent, width and depth.
1586
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001587- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1588 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1589
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001590- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1591 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1592
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001593- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1594
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001595- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1596
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001597- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1598
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001599- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1600 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1601
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001602- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001603 for better performance.
1604
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001605- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001606
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001607- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1608 a string).
1609
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001610- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1611
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001612- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1613
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001614- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1615
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001616- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1617
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001618- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1619 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1620 list of fieldnames.
1621
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001622- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1623 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1624
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001625- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1626
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001627- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1628 empty lists.
1629
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001630- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1631 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1632 and shelves.
1633
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001634- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1635 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1636
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001637- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001638 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1639 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001640
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001641- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1642 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001643 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001644
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001645- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001646 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1647 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1648
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001649- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1650 and removed in Py2.4.
1651
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001652- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1653
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001654- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1655
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001656Tools/Demos
1657-----------
1658
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001659- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1660 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1661
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001662- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1663
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001664- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1665 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1666 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1667 destination in situations where both files are given.
1668
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001669- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1670 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1671 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1672 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1673
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001674- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1675
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001676- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1677 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1678 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1679 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1680 now.
1681
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001682- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1683 in effect
1684
1685- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1686 C-c C-h
1687
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001688- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1689 -d option was given.
1690
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001691Build
1692-----
1693
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001694- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1695 build under OS X.
1696
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001697- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1698 --enable-profiling.
1699
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001700- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1701 is configured --with-tsc.
1702
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001703- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1704 on AMD64.
1705
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001706- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1707 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1708
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001709- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1710 removed.
1711
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001712- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1713 supported (see PEP 11).
1714
1715- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1716
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001717- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1718
1719- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1720 (see PEP 11).
1721
1722- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1723 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1724
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001725C API
1726-----
1727
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001728- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1729 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1730 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1731
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001732- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1733 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1734 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1735 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1736
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001737- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1738 generator objects.
1739
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001740- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1741 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001742 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1743 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001744
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001745- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1746 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1747
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001748- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1749 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1750 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1751 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1752 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1753
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001754- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1755 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1756 about 10% faster.
1757
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001758- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1759 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1760
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001761- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1762 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1763 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1764 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1765
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001766Windows
1767-------
1768
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001769- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1770 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1771 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1772 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1773
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001774- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1775 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1776 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1777
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001778
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001779What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1780===============================
1781
1782*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1783
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001784IDLE
1785----
1786
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001787- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1788 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1789 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1790 context-menu actions.
1791
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001792- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1793 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1794 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1795 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1796 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1797 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1798 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1799 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1800 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1801
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001802
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001803What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1804=============================================
1805
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001806*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001807
1808Core and builtins
1809-----------------
1810
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001811- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001812 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001813 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1814
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001815Extension modules
1816-----------------
1817
1818- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1819 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1820 than once. This has been fixed.
1821
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001822- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1823 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1824 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1825 call.
1826
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001827- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1828
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001829Library
1830-------
1831
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001832- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1833 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1834
1835- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1836 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1837 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1838 restored.
1839
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001840IDLE
1841----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001842
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001843- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001844
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001845Build
1846-----
1847
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001848- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1849 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1850
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001851C API
1852-----
1853
1854Windows
1855-------
1856
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001857- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1858 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1859
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001860- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1861
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001862Mac
1863---
1864
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001865- Various fixes to pimp.
1866
1867- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1868
1869- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1870 more problems than it solves.
1871
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001872
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001873What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1874=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001875
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001876*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1877
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001878Core and builtins
1879-----------------
1880
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001881- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1882 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1883
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001884- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1885 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001886 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001887
1888- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1889 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1890 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001891 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001892
1893- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1894 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001895
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001896- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1897 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1898 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1899
1900- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001901 770247.
1902
1903- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001904
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001905Extension modules
1906-----------------
1907
1908- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1909 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1910
1911- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1912
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001913- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1914
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001915- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1916 contained within the _strptime module.
1917
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001918- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1919 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1920
1921- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001922 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1923
1924- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1925 the find_class attribute, if present.
1926
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001927- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001928
1929 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1930 (SF bug 763298).
1931
1932 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001933 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1934 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1935 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001936
1937 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1938
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001939Library
1940-------
1941
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001942- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1943
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001944- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1945 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1946 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1947 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1948 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1949 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1950 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1951 or Tester().
1952
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001953- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1954 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1955 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1956 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1957 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1958 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1959 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1960 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1961 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001962
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001963 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001964
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001965- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1966 weren't before was an oversight.
1967
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001968- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1969 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1970
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001971- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1972 when there are no lines.
1973
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001974- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1975 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1976
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001977- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1978 to child processes.
1979
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001980- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1981
1982- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1983
1984- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1985 xmlrpclib.
1986
1987- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1988 responses.
1989
1990- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1991 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1992
1993- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1994 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1995 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1996
1997- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1998 used as patterns.
1999
2000- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2001 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2002 than Tk 8.3.
2003
2004- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2005
2006- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002007
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002008Tools/Demos
2009-----------
2010
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002011- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2012
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002013- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2014
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002015- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002016
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002017Build
2018-----
2019
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002020- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2021
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002022- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2023
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002024- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2025 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002026
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002027- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2028 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2029 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002030
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002031C API
2032-----
2033
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002034- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2035 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2036
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002037Windows
2038-------
2039
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002040- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2041 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2042 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2043 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2044 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2045 Python exception ::
2046
2047 thread.error: can't start new thread
2048
2049 is raised now.
2050
2051- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2052 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2053 instead of from DLL teardown.
2054
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002055Mac
2056---
2057
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002058- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002059 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002060 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2061 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2062 the executable in the bundle.
2063
2064- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002065
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002066- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2067
2068- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2069 on Panther.
2070
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002071What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2072================================
2073
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002074*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002075
2076Core and builtins
2077-----------------
2078
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002079- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2080 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2081 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2082 with the -i option.
2083
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002084- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2085 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2086
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002087- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2088 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2089
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002090- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2091 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2092 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2093 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2094 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2095 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2096 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2097 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2098 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2099 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2100 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2101 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2102 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002103
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002104- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2105 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2106 embedded in a lambda expression.
2107
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002108- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2109 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2110 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2111 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2112 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2113
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002114- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2115 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2116 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2117
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002118- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2119 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2120
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002121- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2122 It's writable again.
2123
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002124- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2125 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2126 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002127 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002128
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002129- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2130 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2131 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2132
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002133Extension modules
2134-----------------
2135
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002136- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2137 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2138
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002139- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2140 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2141 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2142 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2143
2144- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2145 collection.
2146
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002147- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2148 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2149 unique within a single program run.
2150
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002151- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2152 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2153
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002154- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2155 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2156
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002157- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2158 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002159
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002160- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2161
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002162- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2163 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2164
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002165- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2166 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2167 for many BSD-derived systems.
2168
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002169
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002170Library
2171-------
2172
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002173- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2174 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2175 primary ones:
2176
2177 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2178 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2179 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2180
2181 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2182 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2183 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2184 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2185 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2186 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2187
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002188- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2189 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2190 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2191 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2192 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2193 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2194 argument.
2195
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002196- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2197 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2198 in the archive.
2199
2200- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2201 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2202
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002203- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2204 569574).
2205
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002206- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2207 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2208 no more.
2209
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002210- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2211 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2212 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2213 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2214 code coverage.
2215
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002216- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2217 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2218 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002219 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2220 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002221
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002222- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2223 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2224 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002225 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002226
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002227- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2228
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002229- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2230 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2231 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2232 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2233
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002234- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2235 handling.
2236
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002237- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2238 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2239
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002240- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2241 in socket.py.
2242
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002243- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2244
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002245- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2246 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2247 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2248 opener with proxy support.
2249
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002250- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2251
2252- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2253
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002254Tools/Demos
2255-----------
2256
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002257- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2258
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002259- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2260
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002261- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2262 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002263
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002264- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2265 files.
2266
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002267Build
2268-----
2269
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002270- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002271 different root directory.
2272
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002273C API
2274-----
2275
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002276- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2277 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2278 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2279 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2280 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2281 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2282 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2283 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2284 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2285 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2286
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002287- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2288 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2289 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2290 from Python.
2291
2292
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002293New platforms
2294-------------
2295
2296None this time.
2297
2298Tests
2299-----
2300
2301- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2302 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2303
2304Windows
2305-------
2306
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002307- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2308
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002309- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2310 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2311 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2312 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2313 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2314 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2315 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2316 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2317 that's what it's for.
2318
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002319Mac
2320---
2321
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002322- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2323 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2324 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2325 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002326- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2327 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2328- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002329
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002330SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2331------------------------------------
2332
2333430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2334598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2335622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2336661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2337683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2338697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2339713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2340724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2341727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2342729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2343730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2344731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2345732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2346733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2347735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2348740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2349744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2350745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2351747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2352749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2353751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2354753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2355755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2356757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2357760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2358
2359
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002360What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2361================================
2362
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002363*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002364
2365Core and builtins
2366-----------------
2367
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002368- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2369 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2370
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002371- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2372 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2373 and cannot be strings).
2374
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002375- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2376 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2377 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2378 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2379
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002380- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2381 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2382 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2383 Python itself.
2384
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002385- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2386 the referenced object, if it has one.
2387
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002388- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2389 the thread started at
2390 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2391
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002392- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2393 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2394 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2395 placed on a list index.
2396
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002397- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2398 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2399 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2400 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2401
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002402- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2403 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2404 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2405 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2406 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2407 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2408 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2409
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002410- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2411 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2412 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2413 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2414 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2415
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002416- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2417 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002418
2419- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2420 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2421 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2422 #693195.)
2423
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002424- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2425 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002426
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002427- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002428 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002429 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2430 interpreter executions, would fail.
2431
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002432- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002433 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002434 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002435
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002436Extension modules
2437-----------------
2438
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002439- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2440 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2441 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2442 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2443
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002444- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2445 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2446
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002447- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2448 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2449 and Greg Chapman.)
2450
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002451- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2452 recursively.
2453
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002454- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002455 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2456 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2457 leaks.
2458
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002459- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2460
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002461- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2462 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2463 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2464 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2465 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2466 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2467 #705836.
2468
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002469- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002470 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2471
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002472- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2473 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2474 See SF bug #692416.
2475
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002476- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2477 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2478
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002479- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2480 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2481 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002482
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002483- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002484 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2485 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2486
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002487- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2488 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2489 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2490 timeouts to work properly.
2491
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002492Library
2493-------
2494
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002495- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2496 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2497 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2498 future release.
2499
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002500- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2501 for querying platform dependent features.
2502
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002503- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002504
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002505- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2506 pickle protocol versions.
2507
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002508- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2509 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2510 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2511
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002512- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2513
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002514- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2515 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2516 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2517 modules.
2518
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002519- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2520 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2521 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2522
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002523- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2524 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2525
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002526- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2527 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2528 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2529
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002530- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002531 MS Office extensions.
2532
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002533- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2534 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2535
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002536- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2537 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2538
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002539- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2540 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2541 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2542 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2543 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2544 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2545
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002546- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2547 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2548 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002549
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002550- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2551 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2552 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2553
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002554- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2555
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002556- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2557 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2558 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2559
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002560Tools/Demos
2561-----------
2562
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002563- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2564 See the module docstring for details.
2565
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002566Build
2567-----
2568
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002569- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2570 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002571
2572C API
2573-----
2574
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002575- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2576
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002577- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2578 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2579 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2580
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002581- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2582 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002583
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002584 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2585 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2586 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002587
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002588- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002589 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2590
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002591- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2592 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2593 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002594
2595New platforms
2596-------------
2597
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002598None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002599
2600Tests
2601-----
2602
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002603- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2604 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002605
2606Windows
2607-------
2608
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002609- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2610 function.
2611
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002612- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2613 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002614
2615Mac
2616---
2617
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002618- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2619 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002620
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002621- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2622 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002623
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002624- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2625 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2626 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002627
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002628- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002629 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2630 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002631
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002632- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2633 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002634
2635
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002636What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2637=================================
2638
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002639*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002640
2641Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002642-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002643
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002644- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2645 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2646 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2647
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002648- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2649 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2650 (SF patch #664376.)
2651
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002652- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2653 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2654 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2655 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2656 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2657 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002658 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002659
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002660- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2661 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2662 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2663 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002664 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002665
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002666- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2667 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2668 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2669 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2670 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2671 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2672 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2673 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2674 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2675 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2676 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2677
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002678- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2679 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2680 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2681 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2682 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2683 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2684
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002685- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2686 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2687
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002688- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2689 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2690 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2691 case.)
2692
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002693- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2694 passed as unicode strings.
2695
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002696- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2697 See SF bug #683467.
2698
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002699- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2700 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2701
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002702- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2703
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002704- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2705
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002706- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2707 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2708 arguments.
2709
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002710- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2711 See SF bug #667147.
2712
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002713- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002714 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002715 See SF bug #676155.
2716
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002717- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002718 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002719 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2720 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2721 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2722 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2723 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2724 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002725
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002726Extension modules
2727-----------------
2728
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002729- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2730 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2731 tp_as_number pointer.
2732
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002733- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2734 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2735 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2736 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2737 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2738
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002739- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2740
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002741- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2742
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002743- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002744 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002745 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2746 patch #678531.)
2747
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002748- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2749 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2750
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002751- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2752 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2753
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002754- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2755
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002756- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2757 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2758 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2759
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002760- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2761
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002762- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2763 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2764
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002765- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002766
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002767- datetime changes:
2768
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002769 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2770
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002771 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2772 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2773 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2774 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2775 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2776 now.
2777
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002778 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002779 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2780 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002781
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002782 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002783 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002784 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2785 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2786 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2787 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002788
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002789 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2790 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2791 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002792 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2793
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002794 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2795 by a later example coded by Guido.
2796
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002797 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002798 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2799 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2800 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002801 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2802 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2803
2804 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2805 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2806 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2807 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2808 tzinfo subclass instance.
2809
2810 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2811 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2812 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2813 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2814 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2815 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2816 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2817 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002818
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002819 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2820 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2821 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2822 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2823 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002824 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2825
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002826 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002827
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002828 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2829 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2830 as a naive datetime object.
2831
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002832 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2833 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2834 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2835
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002836 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2837 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2838 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2839 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2840 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2841 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2842 comparison.
2843
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002844 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2845 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2846 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2847 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002848 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002849
2850 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002851
2852 and ::
2853
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002854 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2855
2856 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2857 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2858 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2859 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2860
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002861 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2862 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2863 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2864 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2865 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2866
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002867 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2868 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002869 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2870 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002871
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002872Library
2873-------
2874
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002875- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2876 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2877
2878- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2879 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2880 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2881 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2882 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2883 See PEP 307 for details.
2884
2885- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2886 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2887
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002888- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2889 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002890 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002891 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2892 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002893 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002894
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002895- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2896 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2897
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002898- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2899 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2900 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2901
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002902- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2903
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002904- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2905 exception.
2906
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002907- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2908 class.
2909
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002910- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2911 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2912 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2913
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002914- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2915 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2916
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002917- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002918 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2919 See SF bug #659228.
2920
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002921- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2922 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2923 See SF patch #651082.
2924
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002925- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002926
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002927- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2928 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2929
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002930- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002931 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002932
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002933- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2934 DOS paths from other platforms.
2935
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002936Tools/Demos
2937-----------
2938
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002939- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2940 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2941 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2942 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2943 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2944 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2945 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2946 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2947 example:
2948
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002949 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2950 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002951
2952 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2953
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002954
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002955Build
2956-----
2957
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002958- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2959 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2960 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002961 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2962
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002963 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2964
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002965- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2966 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2967 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2968 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2969 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2970 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2971 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2972 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2973 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2974
2975- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2976 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2977 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2978 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2979
2980- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2981 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2982
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002983C API
2984-----
2985
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002986- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2987 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002988
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002989- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2990 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2991 tp_as_number pointer.
2992
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002993- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2994 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2995 (SF #681367)
2996
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002997- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2998 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2999 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3000 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003001
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003002Tests
3003-----
3004
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003005- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003006 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3007 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3008 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3009 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3010 pydoc.)
3011
3012- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3013
3014- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003015
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003016Windows
3017-------
3018
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003019- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3020 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3021 time).
3022
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003023- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3024 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3025
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003026- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3027 release without strong cryptography.
3028
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003029- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003030 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003031
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003032- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3033 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3034
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003035Mac
3036---
3037
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003038- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3039 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003040
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003041- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3042 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3043 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003044
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003045- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3046 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003047
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003048- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3049 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3050 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3051 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003052
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003053- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003054 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3055 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3056 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003057
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003058
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003059What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003060=================================
3061
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003062*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003063
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003064Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003065--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003066
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003067- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3068
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003069- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3070 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003071 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003072 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003073 a different meaning than before.
3074
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003075- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003076 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003077 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003078
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003079- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003080 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003081 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003082
3083- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3084 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3085 and deallocation.
3086
3087- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3088 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3089
3090- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3091 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3092 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3093 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3094 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3095
3096- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3097 now detected by the garbage collector.
3098
3099- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3100 [SF bug 519621]
3101
3102- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3103 identifier.
3104
3105- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3106 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3107 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3108 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3109 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3110 [SF bug 563060]
3111
3112- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3113 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3114 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3115 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3116 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3117
3118- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3119 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3120 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3121
3122- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3123
3124- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3125 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3126 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3127 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3128 state of the slots would be lost.)
3129
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003130Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003131-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003132
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003133- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003134 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3135 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3136 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3137 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003138 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3139 Jython 2.1.
3140
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003141- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003142 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003143 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3144 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3145 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3146 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3147 these, see PEP 302.
3148
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003149- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3150 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3151 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3152
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003153- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3154 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3155 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3156
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003157- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3158 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3159 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3160
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003161- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3162 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3163 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3164 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3165 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3166 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3167 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3168 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3169 releases or implementations.
3170
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003171- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003172 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3173 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003174
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003175- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3176 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3177
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003178- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3179 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3180 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3181
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003182- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3183 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3184
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003185- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3186 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003187 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3188 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003189
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003190- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3191 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3192 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3193 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3194 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3195
3196 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3197 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3198 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3199 pattern.
3200
3201 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3202 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3203 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3204 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3205
3206 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3207 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3208 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3209 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3210 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3211 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3212
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003213- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3214 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3215 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3216 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3217 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3218 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3219 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3220 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003221
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003222- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3223 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3224 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3225 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3226 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003227 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3228 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3229 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3230 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3231 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3232 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3233 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003234
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003235- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3236 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3237
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003238- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3239 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3240 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3241 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3242 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3243 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3244 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3245 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3246 to Zack Weinberg!
3247
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003248- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3249 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3250 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3251 type. This has been fixed now.
3252
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003253- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3254 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3255 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3256
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003257- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3258 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3259 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3260 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3261 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3262 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3263 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3264 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003265 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003266
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003267- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3268 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3269 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003270
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003271- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3272 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3273 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3274 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3275 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3276 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3277 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3278 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003279 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003280 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3281 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3282
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003283- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3284 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3285 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3286 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3287 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3288 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3289 this.)
3290
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003291- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3292 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003293 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003294 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003295 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3296 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003297 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3298 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003299
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003300- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3301 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3302 currently running.
3303
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003304- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3305 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3306 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3307 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3308
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003309- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3310 as directory names.
3311
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003312- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3313 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3314
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003315- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3316 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3317
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003318- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003319 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3320 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003321
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003322- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3323 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3324 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3325 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3326 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3327
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003328- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3329 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3330 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3331 removed.
3332
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003333- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3334 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3335 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3336
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003337- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3338 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3339 to __debug__.
3340
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003341- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3342 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3343 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3344
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003345- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3346 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3347 deprecated now.
3348
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003349- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3350 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3351 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003352
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003353- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3354 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3355 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3356 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3357 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003358
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003359- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3360 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3361
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003362- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3363 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3364 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003365 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003366 is backward compatible.
3367
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003368- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3369 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3370 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3371 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3372 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3373
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003374- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3375 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3376 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3377 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3378 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3379 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003380
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003381- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3382 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3383
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003384- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3385 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3386
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003387- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3388 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3389 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3390 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3391 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3392
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003393- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3394 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3395 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3396
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003397- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003398 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3399
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003400- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3401 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3402 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003403
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003404- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3405 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3406
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003407- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3408 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3409 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3410
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003411- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3412
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003413Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003414-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003415
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003416- Added three operators to the operator module:
3417 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3418 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3419 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3420
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003421- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3422
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003423- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3424 archives.
3425
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003426- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3427 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3428 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3429
3430 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3431
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003432- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3433 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3434 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003435 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003436
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003437- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3438 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3439 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3440 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003441 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3442 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3443 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3444 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003445
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003446- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3447 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003448
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003449- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3450
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003451- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3452 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3453
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003454- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3455 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3456 supported.
3457
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003458- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3459
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003460- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3461 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003462
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003463- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3464 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3465
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003466- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3467
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003468- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3469 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3470
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003471- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3472 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3473 functions but callable type objects.
3474
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003475- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003476 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003477 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003478
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003479- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3480 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003481
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003482- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3483 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003484
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003485- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3486 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3487 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3488 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3489
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003490- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3491 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003492
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003493- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3494 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3495 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3496 and __imul__.
3497
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003498- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003499 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3500 is called.
3501
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003502- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3503 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3504 interpreter was compiled.
3505
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003506- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3507 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3508 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003509 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003510 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3511 1, not 2.
3512
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003513- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3514 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3515 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3516 limit.
3517
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003518- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3519 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3520 bug #623464.
3521
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003522- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3523 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3524 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3525 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3526
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003527Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003528-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003529
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003530- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3531
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003532- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3533 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3534 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3535 with Python 2.3a2.
3536
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003537- os.path exposes getctime.
3538
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003539- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003540 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003541 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003542 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003543 unit tests of floating point results.
3544
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003545- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3546 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3547 has been increased.
3548
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003549- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3550 executed.
3551
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003552- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3553 postinstallation script.
3554
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003555- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3556 test the current module.
3557
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003558- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003559 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3560 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3561 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3562 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3563
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003564- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003565 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003566 Ward's Optik package.
3567
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003568- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3569 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3570 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3571 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3572
3573- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3574 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003575 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003576
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003577- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3578 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3579 shelf are binary pickles.
3580
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003581- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3582 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3583
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003584- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3585 modules are iterators now.
3586
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003587- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3588 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3589 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3590 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3591 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3592 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003593
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003594- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3595 with their entity value.
3596
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003597- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3598
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003599- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3600 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003601
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003602- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3603 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003604 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003605
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003606- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3607 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3608 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3609 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3610 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3611 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3612 main():
3613
3614 import locale
3615 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3616
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003617- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3618 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3619
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003620- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3621 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3622 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3623 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3624 to the new standard.
3625
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003626- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3627 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3628 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3629 an extension to the database.
3630
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003631- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3632 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3633 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3634 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003635 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003636
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003637- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003638 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003639
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003640- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3641 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3642 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3643 bounded integers.
3644
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003645- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3646 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3647 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3648 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3649 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3650 in existence.
3651
3652 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3653 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3654 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3655 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3656 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3657 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3658
3659 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3660 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3661 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3662 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3663
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003664- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3665 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3666 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3667
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003668- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3669
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003670- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3671 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3672 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3673 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3674
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003675- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3676 argument.
3677
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003678- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3679 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3680 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3681 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3682 [SF patch 560794].
3683
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003684- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3685 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3686 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003687 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3688 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3689 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003690
3691- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3692 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003693
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003694- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3695 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3696 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3697 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003698
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003699- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3700 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3701 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3702 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3703 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3704
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003705- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003706
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003707- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3708
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003709- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3710 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3711 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3712 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3713 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3714 identical to None.
3715
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003716- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3717 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3718 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3719 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3720 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3721 results now.
3722
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003723- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3724 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3725
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003726- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3727 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3728 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3729 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3730 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3731 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3732 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3733 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3734
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003735- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3736
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003737- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3738 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3739
3740- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3741 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3742 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3743 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3744 and other systems.
3745
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003746- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3747 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3748 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3749 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 +00003750 work well with these.
3751
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003752- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3753
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003754- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003755 connections.
3756
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003757- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3758 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3759 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3760
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003761- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3762 sets
3763
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003764- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3765 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3766 name.
3767
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003768- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3769 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3770 passed in.
3771
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003772- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003773 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003774 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3775 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003776
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003777- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3778
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003779- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3780
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003781- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3782 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3783 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3784
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003785- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3786 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3787 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3788 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003789 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003790
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003791- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003792 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003793 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003794
3795- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3796 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3797 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3798
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003799- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003800 the value of its expression argument.
3801
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003802- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3803 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3804 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3805
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003806- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3807 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3808 skipstone browser was included.
3809
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003810- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3811 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3812
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003813Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003814-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003815
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003816- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3817 names in addition to accepting file names.
3818
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003819- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3820 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3821 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3822 still used and useful.)
3823
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003824- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3825 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3826 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3827 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003828
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003829- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3830 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3831 the generated binary.
3832
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003833Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003834-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003835
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003836- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3837
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003838- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3839 except in the hands of experts.
3840
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003841- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003842 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3843 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3844 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003845
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003846- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3847 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3848 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3849 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3850 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3851 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3852 builds.
3853
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003854- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3855 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3856 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3857 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3858 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3859 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3860 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3861 new type.
3862
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003863- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003864
3865 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3866 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3867 positive infinities.
3868
3869 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3870 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3871 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3872 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3873 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3874 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3875 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3876
3877 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3878
3879 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3880
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003881- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3882 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3883 size of the executable.
3884
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003885- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3886 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3887 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3888 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003889
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003890- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3891
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003892- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3893 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3894 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003895
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003896- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3897 well as Unix.
3898
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003899- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3900 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3901 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3902 modules in the README file for details.
3903
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003904C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003905-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003906
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003907- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3908 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003909 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003910 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003911 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003912
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003913- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3914 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3915 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3916 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3917 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3918 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003919 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003920 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3921 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3922 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3923 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3924 aligned.)
3925
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003926- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3927 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3928 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3929
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003930- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3931 level.
3932
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003933- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3934 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3935 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3936 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3937 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3938
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003939- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3940 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3941 code.
3942
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003943- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3944 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3945 adjusting for negative indices.
3946
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003947- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3948 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3949 object.
3950
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003951- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3952 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3953 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3954
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003955- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3956 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003957
3958- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3959
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003960- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3961 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3962 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3963 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3964
3965- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3966
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003967- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003968
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003969- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003970 without going through the buffer API.
3971
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003972- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003973
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003974- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3975 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3976 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3977 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3978
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003979- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3980 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3981
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003982- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003983 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3984
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003985New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003986-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003987
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003988- OpenVMS is now supported.
3989
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003990- AtheOS is now supported.
3991
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003992- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3993
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003994- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3995
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003996Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003997-----
3998
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003999- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4000 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4001 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004002
4003Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004004-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004005
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004006- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4007 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4008 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4009 bugs.
4010 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004011 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004012 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4013 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004014 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004015
4016- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004017 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004018
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004019- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4020 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4021
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004022- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4023 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004024 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004025 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4026
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004027- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4028 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4029 use files" uninstall option).
4030
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004031- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4032
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004033- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4034 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4035
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004036- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4037 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4038 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4039
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004040- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4041 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4042 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4043 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4044 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004045 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4046 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4047 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004048
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004049- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004050 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004051 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4052 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4053 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4054 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4055 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4056 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4057 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4058 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4059 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4060 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4061 work around.
4062
4063- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4064 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4065 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4066 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4067 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4068 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4069 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4070 specified with O_CREAT too).
4071
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004072Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004073----
4074
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004075- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004076
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004077- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4078 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4079 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4080
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004081- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4082 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4083 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4084
4085- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4086 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4087 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4088 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4089 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4090 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4091 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4092 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004093
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004094- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4095 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4096 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004097
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004098- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4099 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4100 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4101 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4102 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004103
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004104- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4105 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4106 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004107
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004108- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4109 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004110
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004111- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4112 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4113 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4114 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4115 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004116
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004117- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4118 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4119 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4120
4121- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4122 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4123 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004124
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004125- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4126 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4127 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4128 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004129 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004130
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004131- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4132 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004133
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004134- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4135 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004136
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004137- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004138 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004139 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4140 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004141
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004142
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004143What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004144===============================
4145
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4147
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004148Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004149--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004150
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004151- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4152 with a custom metaclass.
4153
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004154Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004155-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004156
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004157- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4158 are proxies.
4159
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004160Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004162
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004163- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4164 very short strings.
4165
4166- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4167 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4168 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4169 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4170 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4171
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004172Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004173-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004174
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004175- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4176 close or delete time).
4177
4178- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4179 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4180
4181- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4182
4183- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004184 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004185
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004186Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004187-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004188
4189Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004190-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004191
4192C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004193-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004194
4195New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004196-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004197
4198Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004199-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004200
4201Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004202-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004203
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004204- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4205
4206- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4207 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4208
4209- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4210 deleted at process exit time.
4211
4212- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4213 in backslash.
4214
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004215Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004216----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004217
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004218- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4219 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4220 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4221
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004222
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004223What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004224===========================
4225
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004226*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4227
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004228Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004229--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004230
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004231- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4232 been extensively updated. See
4233
4234 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4235
4236 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4237
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004238- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4239 deleted!
4240
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004241- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4242 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4243 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4244 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4245 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4246
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004247- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4248
4249 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4250 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4251
4252 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4253 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4254 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4255 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4256 supported anyway.
4257
4258 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4259 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4260
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004261- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4262 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4263 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4264 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4265 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004266
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004267- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4268 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4269 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4270
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004271Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004272-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004273
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004274- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4275 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4276 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4277 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4278 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4279 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004280 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4281 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4282 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4283 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004284
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004285- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4286 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4287 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4288
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004289Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004290-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004291
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004292- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4293
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004294Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004295-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004296
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004297- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4298 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4299 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4300 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4301 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4302 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4303
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004304- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4305
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004306- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4307
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004308- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4309
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004310- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4311 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4312 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4313
4314- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4315
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004316Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004317-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004318
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004319- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4320 off a search on Google.
4321
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004322Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004323-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004324
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004325- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4326 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4327 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4328 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4329 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4330 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4331 other platforms should do likewise.
4332
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004333- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4334 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4335 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4336
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004337C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004338-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004339
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004340- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4341 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4342 producing key-value pairs.
4343
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004344- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004345 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004346 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4347 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4348 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4349 previously went unchallenged.
4350
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004351New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004352-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004353
4354Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004355-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004356
4357Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004358-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004359
4360Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004361----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004362
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004363- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4364 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004365
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004366- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4367 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4368 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4369 home.
4370
4371
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004372What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004373===========================
4374
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004375*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4376
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004377Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004378--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004379
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004380- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4381 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004382
4383 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004384 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004385
4386 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4387 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004388 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004389 This needs to be documented.
4390
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004391- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4392 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4393
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004394- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4395 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4396 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4397
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004398- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4399 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4400
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004401- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4402 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4403 class forbids it).
4404
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004405- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4406 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4407 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4408
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004409- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4410
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004411Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004412-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004413
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004414- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4415 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004416 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004417
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004418- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4419 (like 1 + '').
4420
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004421Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004422-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004423
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004424- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4425 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4426 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4427 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004428 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004429 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4430
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004431- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4432 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4433 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4434 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4435
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004436- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4437 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004438 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4439 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4440 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004441
4442- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4443 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004444
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004445- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4446 bytes on its input.
4447
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004448Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004449-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004450
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004451- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004452 convenience function.
4453
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004454- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4455 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4456 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004457 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4458 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4459 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4460 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4461 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4462 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004463
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004464- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4465 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4466 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4467 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4468
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004469- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4470 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4471 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4472
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004473- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4474 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4475 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4476 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4477
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004478- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4479 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004480 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004481 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4482 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4483 new -l and -e options.
4484
4485- statcache is now deprecated.
4486
4487- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4488 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004489 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004490 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4491 time properly taken into account.
4492
4493- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4494 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4495 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4496 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4497
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004498Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004499-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004500
4501Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004502-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004503
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004504- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4505 is built with libdb3 if available.
4506
4507- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4508
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004509C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004510-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004511
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004512- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4513 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4514 PySequence_Size().
4515
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004516- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4517
4518- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4519 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4520 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4521
4522- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4523 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4524
4525- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4526 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4527
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004528New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004529-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004530
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004531- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4532 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4533
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004534- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4535 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4536
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004537- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4538
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004539Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004541
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004542- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4543 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4544
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004545Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004546-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004547
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004548Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004549----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004550
4551- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4552 removed completely in the next release.
4553
4554- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4555 OSX.
4556
4557- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4558 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4559
4560- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4561
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004562
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004563What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004564===========================
4565
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004566*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4567
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004568Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004569--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004570
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004571- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004572 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004573 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004574 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4575 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004576 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4577 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004578 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4579 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004580
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004581- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4582 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4583
4584- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4585 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4586
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004587Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004589
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004590- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4591 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4592 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4593 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4594 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4595 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4596 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4597 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4598
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004599- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4600 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4601 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4602 example).
4603
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004604- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004605 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004606 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004607 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004608
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004609- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4610 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4611 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004612 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004613
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004614- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4615 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4616 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4617 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4618 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4619 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4620
4621 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4622
4623 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4624
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004625Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004626-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004627
4628- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4629
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004630- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4631
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004632- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4633 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004634
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004635- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4636 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4637 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4638 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4639 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4640 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004641 attributes.
4642
4643- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4644 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4645 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004646
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004647- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4648 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4649 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004650
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004651- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4652 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4653 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004654 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4655 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4656
4657- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4658 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004659
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004660Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004661-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004662
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004663- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4664 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4665
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004666- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4667 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4668 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4669 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4670
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004671- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4672 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4673 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4674 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4675
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004676 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4677 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4678 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4679 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4680 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4681 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4682 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4683 without losing information).
4684
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004685- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004686 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4687 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4688 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4689 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4690 module).
4691
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004692 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004693 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4694 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4695 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4696 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004697
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004698- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004699 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4700 encoding.
4701
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004702- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4703 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4704
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004705- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004706 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4707
4708- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4709 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4710 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4711 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4712
4713- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4714
4715- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4716 ON, and OFF.
4717
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004718- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4719 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4720
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004721Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004722-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004723
4724- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4725 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4726 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004727
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004728- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4729 been added: -X and -E.
4730
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004731Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004732-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004733
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004734- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4735 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4736
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004737C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004738-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004739
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004740- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4741 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4742 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4743 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4744 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4745
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004746- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4747 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4748 as long) arguments.
4749
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004750- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4751 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4752 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4753 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4754 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4755 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4756
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004757- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4758 input.
4759
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004760New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004761-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004762
4763Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004764-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004765
4766Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004767-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004768
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004769- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4770 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4771 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4772
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004773- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4774 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4775 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004776 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004777
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004778 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4779 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4780 import signal
4781 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004782
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004783 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004784 while 1:
4785 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004786 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004787 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4788 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4789 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4790 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004791
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004792
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004793What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4794===========================
4795
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004796*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4797
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004798Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004799--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004800
4801- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4802 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4803 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4804
4805- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4806 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4807 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4808 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4809 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4810 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4811 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004812
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004813- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004814 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004815 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4816 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4817 associate a docstring with a property.
4818
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004819- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4820 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4821 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4822 other built-in object types.
4823
4824- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4825 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4826 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4827 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4828 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4829
4830- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4831 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4832
4833- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4834 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004835 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004836 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4837 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4838 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4839 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4840 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4841
4842- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4843 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4844 class.
4845
4846- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4847 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4848 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4849 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4850
4851- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4852 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4853 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4854 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4855
4856- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4857 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4858
4859- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4860 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4861 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4862 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4863 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004864 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004865 with the same value as s.
4866
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004867- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4868
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004869Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004870----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004871
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004872- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4873
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004874- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4875 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4876 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4877 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4878 objects.
4879
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004880- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4881 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004882 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4883 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4884
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004885- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4886 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4887 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4888
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004889Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004890-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004891
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004892- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4893 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4894 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4895 by the instances.
4896
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004897- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4898 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4899 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4900
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004901- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4902 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4903 before the entire comparison is complete.
4904
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004905- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4906 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4907 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4908
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004909- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4910 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4911 getwriter().
4912
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004913- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4914 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4915
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004916- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004917 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4918 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4919
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004920- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4921 iterable object.
4922
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004923- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4924 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004925
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004926- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4927 authentication.
4928
4929- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4930 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004931
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004932- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004933 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4934 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4935 a sample driver.)
4936
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004937Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004938-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004939
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004940- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4941 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4942 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4943 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4944 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4945 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4946 kernel has large file support.
4947
4948- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4949 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4950 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4951 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4952 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4953
4954- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4955 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4956 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4957
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004958C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004959-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004960
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004961- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4962 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4963
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004964New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004965-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004966
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004967- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4968 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4969
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004970Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004971-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004972
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004973- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4974 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4975 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4976 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4977 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4978
4979- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4980 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4981 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4982 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4983
4984- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4985 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4986
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004987Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004988-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004989
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004990- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004991 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4992 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004993
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004994
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004995What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4996===========================
4997
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004998*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4999
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005000Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005001----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005002
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005003- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5004 big to represent as a C double.
5005
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005006- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5007 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5008 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5009 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5010 restriction).
5011
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005012- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5013 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5014 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5015 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5016 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5017
5018 >>> dir([])
5019 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5020 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5021 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5022 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5023 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5024 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5025 'reverse', 'sort']
5026
5027 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5028
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005029- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005030 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5031 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5032 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5033 OverflowError exception.
5034
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005035- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005036 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005037 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5038 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5039 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5040 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5041 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005042 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005043 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5044 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5045
5046 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5047 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5048 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5049 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005050
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005051- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005052 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5053 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5054 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5055 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5056 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5057 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5058 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5059 once it is created.
5060
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005061- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5062 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5063 (key, value) pairs.
5064
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005065- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005066 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5067 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5068
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005069- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5070 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5071 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5072 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5073 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005074
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005075- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005076 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5077 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5078
5079 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5080
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005081- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005082 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5083
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005084Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005085-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005086
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005087- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005088 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5089 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005090
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005091- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5092 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5093 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5094 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5095 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5096 in this area anymore).
5097
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005098- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5099 threading.Timer.
5100
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005101- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5102 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5103
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005104- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005105 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5106
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005107- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005108 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5109 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5110 converted to Python longs.
5111
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005112- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005113 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5114
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005115- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5116 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5117 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5118
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005119Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005120-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005121
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005122- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5123 division operators as per PEP 238.
5124
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005125Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005126-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005127
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005128- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5129 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5130 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5131 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5132
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005133C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005134-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005135
5136- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005137
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005138- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5139 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005140 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005141
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005142 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5143 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005144 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005145 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005146
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005147- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005148 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5149 module:
5150
5151 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005152
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005153 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5154 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005155
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005156 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5157 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005158
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005159 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5160
5161 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5162
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005163- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005164 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5165 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5166 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005167
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005168New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005169-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005170
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005171- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5172 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5173 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5174 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5175 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005176
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005177Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005178-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005179
5180Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005181-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005182
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005183- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5184 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5185 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5186 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005187 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5188 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5189 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5190 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5191 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005192
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005193- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005194 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5195
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005196
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005197What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5198===========================
5199
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005200*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5201
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005202Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005203-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005204
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005205- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5206 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5207
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005208- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5209 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5210 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005211
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005212- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5213 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5214 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5215 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005216
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005217- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5218
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005219- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005220
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005221Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005222-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005223
5224- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005225 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005226 the module docstring for details.
5227
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005228Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005229-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005230
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005231- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005232 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5233 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5234 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005235
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005236- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5237 Nick Mathewson.
5238
5239Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005240----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005241
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005242- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5243 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5244 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5245 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5246 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5247 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5248 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5249 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5250
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005251- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5252 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5253 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5254 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5255
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005256- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5257 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5258 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5259 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5260 come a long way).
5261
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005262- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5263 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5264 write filters for these warnings).
5265
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005266- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5267 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5268 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5269 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5270 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5271
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005272- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5273 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5274 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5275 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5276 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5277 older distribution.
5278
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005279Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005280-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005281
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005282- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5283 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005284 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005285
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005286- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5287 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5288 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5289
5290- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5291
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005292- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5293
5294- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5295
5296- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5297
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005298- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005299
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005300- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5301
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005302New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005303-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005304
5305C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005306-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005307
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005308- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5309 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5310 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5311 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5312 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5313 against buffer overruns.
5314
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005315- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005316 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5317 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005318 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5319 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5320 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5321
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005322- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5323 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5324 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5325 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5326 deprecated.
5327
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005328Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005329-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005330
5331- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5332 relevant is found.
5333
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005334
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005335What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005336===========================
5337
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005338*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5339
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005340Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005341----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005342
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005343- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5344 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5345 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5346 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5347 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5348 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5349 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5350 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005351 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005352 repaired.
5353
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005354- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005355 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005356 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5357 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5358 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5359 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5360 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5361 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5362 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5363 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5364
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005365- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5366 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5367 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5368 leading BMO character).
5369
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005370- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5371 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5372 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5373
5374 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5375 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5376 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005377
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005378 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5379 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5380 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5381 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5382 for various simple to use conversions.
5383
5384 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5385 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5386
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005387 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5388 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5389 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5390 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5391 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5392 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5393 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5394 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5395 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5396 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5397 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5398 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5399 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5400 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5401 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005402
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005403- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5404 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5405 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005406 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005407 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005408
5409 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005410 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5411 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5412 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5413 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5414 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005415 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5416 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005417
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005418 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5419 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5420 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005421 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005422
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005423- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5424 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5425 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5426 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5427 floating arithmetic,
5428
5429 x = 9007199254740992.0
5430 print long(x)
5431
5432 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5433 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5434 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5435 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5436 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5437 functions are of good quality).
5438
5439 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5440 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5441 algorithms to break.
5442
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005443- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5444 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5445 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5446 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5447 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5448 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5449 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5450 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5451 order.
5452
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005453- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5454 operation along the most common code paths.
5455
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005456- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5457 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5458
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005459- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5460 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5461 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5462 {}.update(UserDict())
5463
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005464- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5465 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5466 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5467 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5468 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5469 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5470 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5471 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5472
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005473- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005474 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005475
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005476 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005477 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5478 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005479 join() method of strings
5480 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005481 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5482 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005483 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005484 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005485
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005486- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5487 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5488
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005489- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5490 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5491
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005492- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5493 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5494 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5495 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5496
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005497- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5498 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005499 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005500 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5501 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005502
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005503- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5504
5505
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005506Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005507-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005508
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005509- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005510 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005511 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5512 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5513
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005514- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5515 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5516
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005517- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5518 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5519 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5520 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5521
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005522- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5523 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5524 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5525
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005526- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5527
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005528- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5529
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005530- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5531 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5532 that are still imported into string.py).
5533
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005534- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5535
5536- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5537 Now it does.
5538
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005539- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5540
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005541- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5542 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5543 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5544 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5545 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005546 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5547 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005548
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005549- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5550 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5551 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5552 'help(object)'.
5553
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005554Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005555-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005556
5557- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005558 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005559 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5560 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5561
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005562- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005563 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5564 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005565
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005566C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005567-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005568
5569- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5570 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005571
5572----
5573
5574**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**