blob: 89a6c5712f8605e7352a4f243c0cf3e227fc4ca9 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XXXX-XX-XX*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +000015- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
16 constant.
17
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +000018- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
19 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
20 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
21 large), and to anomalies such as
22 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
23 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
24 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
25 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000026
27Extension modules
28-----------------
29
30...
31
32Library
33-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000034
35- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000036
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +000037- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
38 applications should use the getmember function.
39
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +000040- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
41
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +000042- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
43 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
44 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
45 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
46 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
47 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
48 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
49 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
50 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
51
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000052- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
53 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +000054 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000055
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000056- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
57 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
58 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
59 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
60 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
61 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
62 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
63 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000064
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +000065- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000066 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
67 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
68 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
69 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
70 integration features instead. It would help if those were documented.
71
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +000072- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
73
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000074Build
75-----
76
77...
78
79C API
80-----
81
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +000082- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
83
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000084- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
85 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
86 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000087
88Documentation
89-------------
90
91...
92
93Tests
94-----
95
96- test__locale ported to unittest
97
98Windows
99-------
100
101...
102
103Mac
104---
105
106...
107
108New platforms
109-------------
110
111...
112
113Tools/Demos
114-----------
115
116...
117
118
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000119What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
120=================================
121
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000122*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000123
124Core and builtins
125-----------------
126
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000127- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000128 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
129
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000130- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
131 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
132 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
133 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
134 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
135 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
136 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
137 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000138 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
139 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
140 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
141 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
142 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000143
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000144- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
145 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
146 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
147 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
148 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
149
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000150- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
151
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000152- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
153 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
154
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000155- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
156 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
157 modified the list.
158
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000159- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
160 functions is now writable.
161
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000162- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
163 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
164 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
165 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
166
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000167- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
168 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
169 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
170 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
171 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000172
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000173- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
174 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
175
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000176Extension modules
177-----------------
178
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000179- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
180
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000181- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
182 data.
183
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000184- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
185 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
186 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
187 supposed to have been truncated away.
188
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000189- Added socket.socketpair().
190
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000191- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
192 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
193
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000194- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000195 versions of Python, have now been removed.
196
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000197Library
198-------
199
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000200- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000201 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000202
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000203- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
204 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
205
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000206- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
207 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
208
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000209- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
210
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000211- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
212 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000213
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000214- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
215 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
216
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000217- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
218
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000219- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
220
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000221- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
222
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000223- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
224 Percivall.
225
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000226- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
227 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
228
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000229- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
230 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
231 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000232 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000233
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000234- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
235 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
236 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
237 and exponent.
238
239- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
240
241- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
242 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
243 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
244
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000245- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
246 to the readline module.
247
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000248- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000249 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
250 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000251
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000252- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
253 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
254 contains symlinks.
255
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000256- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
257 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
258
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000259- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
260 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
261 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
262
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000263- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
264 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
265 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
266 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
267 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
268 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
269 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
270 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
271 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
272 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
273 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
274 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
275 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
276
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000277- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
278
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000279Tools/Demos
280-----------
281
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000282- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
283 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
284
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000285- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
286
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000287Build
288-----
289
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000290- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
291 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
292 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
293 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
294 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
295 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
296 plans to do so.
297
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000298- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
299 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
300
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000301- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
302 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
303
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000304- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
305 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
306
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000307- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
308 GNU/k*BSD systems.
309
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000310- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
311 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
312
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000313C API
314-----
315
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000316..
317
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000318Documentation
319-------------
320
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000321- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
322 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
323
324- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
325 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
326 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000327
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000328New platforms
329-------------
330
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000331- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
332
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000333Tests
334-----
335
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000336..
337
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000338Windows
339-------
340
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000341- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
342 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
343 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
344 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
345 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
346 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
347 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
348 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
349 the problem.
350
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000351Mac
352---
353
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000354..
355
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000356
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000357What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
358=================================
359
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000360*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000361
362Core and builtins
363-----------------
364
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000365- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
366 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
367 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
368 sensitive code.
369
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000370- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000371 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000372
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000373 @staticmethod
374 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000375
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000376 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000377
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000378- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
379 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
380 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
381 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
382 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
383 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
384 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
385 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
386 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
387 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
388 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
389
390 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
391 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
392 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
393 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
394 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
395 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
396 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
397
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000398- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
399 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
400
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000401- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000402 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000403
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000404- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000405 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000406 which was missing for no apparent reason.
407
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000408- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000409 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
410 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
411
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000412- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
413 types that support garbage collection.
414
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000415- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
416
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000417- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
418 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
419 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
420 Jython.
421
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000422- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
423
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000424- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
425 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
426
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000427- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
428 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
429 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000430
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000431- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
432 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
433 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
434
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000435Extension modules
436-----------------
437
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000438- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
439
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000440Library
441-------
442
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000443- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
444 TIS-620
445
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000446- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
447 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
448 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
449 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
450 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
451 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
452 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
453 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
454 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
455 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
456
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000457- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
458
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000459- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
460 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
461 same as when the argument is omitted).
462 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
463
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000464- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
465
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000466- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
467 schemes are offered.
468
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000469- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
470
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000471- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
472 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
473 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
474
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000475- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
476
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000477- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
478 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
479
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000480- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
481 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
482 when dummy_threading is being used.
483
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000484- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
485 from a tarfile.
486
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000487- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000488 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000489
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000490- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
491 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
492 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
493 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
494
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000495- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
496 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
497
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000498- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
499 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
500 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
501 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
502 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
503 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
504 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
505 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
506 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
507 by some other method in progress).
508
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000509- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
510 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
511 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000512
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000513- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
514
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000515- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
516 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
517 AM Kuchling.
518
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000519- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
520 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
521 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
522
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000523- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
524 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
525 instead of unsigned.
526
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000527- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000528 no longer part of the public API.
529
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000530- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
531 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
532 string methods of the same name).
533
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000534- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000535 SF patch 945642.
536
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000537- doctest unittest integration improvements:
538
539 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
540
541 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
542 DocTestSuites.
543
544- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
545 that provide thread-local data.
546
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000547- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
548 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
549
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000550- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
551
552- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
553 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
554 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
555
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000556- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
557
558 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
559 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
560 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000561
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000562 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
563 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
564 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
565 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
566
567 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
568 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
569
570 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
571 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
572 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
573 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
574
575 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
576 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
577 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
578 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
579 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
580
581 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
582 wrapping help output.
583
584 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
585 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
586 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000587
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000588C API
589-----
590
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000591- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
592 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
593 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
594 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
595 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
596 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
597 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
598 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
599 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
600 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
601 its visible semantics have not changed.
602
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000603- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
604 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
605
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000606Documentation
607-------------
608
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000609- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000610
611 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000612 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000613
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000614 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000615
616 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
617
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000618- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000619
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000620Tests
621-----
622
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000623- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000624 platforms that use the Makefile.
625
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000626- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
627 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
628 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
629
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000630
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000631What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
632=================================
633
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000634*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000635
636Core and builtins
637-----------------
638
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000639- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
640 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
641 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
642 objects now (one object instead of three).
643
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000644- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
645 Windows DLLs.
646
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000647- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
648 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000649
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000650- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
651 a new .pyc magic.
652
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000653- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
654 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
655 be there.
656
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000657- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
658 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
659 the LC_NUMERIC category.
660
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000661- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
662 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
663 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
664
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000665- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
666
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000667- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
668 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
669 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000670
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000671- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
672 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
673
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000674- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
675
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000676- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000677 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000678
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000679- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
680
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000681- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
682
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000683- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
684 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
685
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000686- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
687 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
688 Fixes bug #858016 .
689
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000690- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
691 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
692 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
693
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000694- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
695 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
696 improves their performance (about 35%).
697
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000698- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
699 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
700 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
701
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000702- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
703 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
704 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
705 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
706
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000707- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
708 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
709 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
710 length is not known).
711
712- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
713 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000714 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
715 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000716 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
717
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000718- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
719 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
720
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000721- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
722 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
723 keyword arguments.
724
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000725- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
726 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
727 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
728
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000729- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
730 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
731 cases.
732
733- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
734 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
735 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
736 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
737 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
738 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
739 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
740 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
741 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
742 a release build.
743
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000744- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
745 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
746
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000747- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000748 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000749
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000750- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
751 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
752 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
753 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
754 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
755 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
756 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
757 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
758 destroyed.
759
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000760- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
761 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
762 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
763 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
764 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
765 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
766 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
767 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
768
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000769- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
770 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
771 character other than a space.
772
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000773- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
774 by the function object or by the method object, the function
775 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
776 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
777 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
778 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
779 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
780 attributes with the same name.
781
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000782- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
783 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
784 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
785 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
786 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
787 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
788 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
789 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
790 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
791 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
792 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
793 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
794 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
795 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000796
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000797- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
798 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
799 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
800 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
801 This has been repaired.
802
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000803- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
804
805- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
806
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000807- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
808 over a sequence.
809
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000810- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000811 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000812
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000813- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
814
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000815- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
816 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
817 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
818 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
819 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
820 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
821 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
822 records with equal keys is unchanged).
823
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000824- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
825 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
826 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
827
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000828- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
829 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
830 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
831 freelist.
832
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000833- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
834 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
835
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000836- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
837 number.
838
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000839- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
840 a TypeError exception.
841
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000842- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
843 820195.
844
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000845- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
846 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
847 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
848
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000849- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000850 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
851 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000852
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000853- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
854 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
855 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
856
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000857- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
858 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000859 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000860
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000861- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000862 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
863 the first call.
864
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000865
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000866Extension modules
867-----------------
868
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000869- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
870 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
871
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000872- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
873 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
874 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
875 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
876 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
877 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
878 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000879
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000880- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
881
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000882- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
883
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000884- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
885 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
886
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000887- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
888 fewer false positives.
889
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000890- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
891 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
892
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000893- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000894 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
895
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000896- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000897 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000898 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000899 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
900 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000901
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000902- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
903 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
904 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
905 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
906
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000907- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
908 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
909 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
910 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
911 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
912 #897625.
913
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000914- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
915 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
916
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000917- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
918 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
919 and pops on either side of the deque.
920
921- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
922 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
923
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000924- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
925 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
926 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
927 other functions that expect a function argument.
928
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000929- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
930
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000931- os.getsid was added.
932
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000933- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
934 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
935 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
936
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000937- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
938
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000939- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
940
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000941- readline.clear_history was added.
942
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000943- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
944
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000945- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
946
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000947- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
948
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000949- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
950
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000951- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
952
953- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
954
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000955- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
956
957- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
958
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000959- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
960 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
961 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
962
963- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
964 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
965 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
966 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
967 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
968 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
969 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
970
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000971- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
972 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
973 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
974 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000975
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000976- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000977 iterators from a single iterable.
978
979- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
980 of raising a TypeError exception.
981
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000982- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
983 as parameter.
984
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000985Library
986-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000987
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000988- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
989 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
990 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000991
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000992- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
993 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
994 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000995
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000996- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000997
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000998- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
999 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001000
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001001- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1002 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1003
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001004- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1005
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001006- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001007 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001008
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001009- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001010 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001011
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001012- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1013
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001014- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1015 on cygwin and mingw32.
1016
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001017- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1018
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001019- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1020 module.
1021
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001022- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1023 installation scheme for all platforms.
1024
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001025- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001026 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001027
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001028- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1029 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1030 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1031
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001032- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1033 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1034 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1035
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001036- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1037
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001038- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1039
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001040- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1041 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1042
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001043- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1044 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1045 type pattern with the same value exists.
1046
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001047- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1048 when run from the command prompt).
1049
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001050- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1051 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1052
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001053- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1054 default sort).
1055
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001056- Added global runctx function to profile module
1057
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001058- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1059
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001060- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1061
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001062- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1063
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001064- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001065 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1066 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1067 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1068 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1069 accordingly.
1070
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001071- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1072 decoding standards.
1073
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001074- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1075 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1076 called for all requests.
1077
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001078- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1079 they are passed to the compiler.
1080
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001081- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1082 indent, width and depth.
1083
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001084- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1085 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1086
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001087- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1088 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1089
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001090- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1091
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001092- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1093
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001094- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1095
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001096- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1097 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1098
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001099- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001100 for better performance.
1101
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001102- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001103
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001104- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1105 a string).
1106
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001107- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1108
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001109- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1110
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001111- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1112
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001113- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1114
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001115- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1116 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1117 list of fieldnames.
1118
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001119- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1120 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1121
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001122- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1123
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001124- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1125 empty lists.
1126
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001127- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1128 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1129 and shelves.
1130
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001131- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1132 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1133
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001134- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001135 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1136 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001137
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001138- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1139 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001140 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001141
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001142- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001143 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1144 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1145
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001146- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1147 and removed in Py2.4.
1148
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001149- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1150
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001151- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1152
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001153Tools/Demos
1154-----------
1155
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001156- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1157 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1158
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001159- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1160
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001161- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1162 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1163 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1164 destination in situations where both files are given.
1165
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001166- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1167 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1168 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1169 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1170
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001171- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1172
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001173- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1174 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1175 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1176 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1177 now.
1178
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001179- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1180 in effect
1181
1182- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1183 C-c C-h
1184
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001185- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1186 -d option was given.
1187
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001188Build
1189-----
1190
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001191- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1192 build under OS X.
1193
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001194- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1195 --enable-profiling.
1196
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001197- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1198 is configured --with-tsc.
1199
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001200- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1201 on AMD64.
1202
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001203- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1204 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1205
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001206- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1207 removed.
1208
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001209- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1210 supported (see PEP 11).
1211
1212- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1213
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001214- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1215
1216- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1217 (see PEP 11).
1218
1219- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1220 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1221
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001222C API
1223-----
1224
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001225- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1226 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1227 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1228
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001229- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1230 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1231 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1232 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1233
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001234- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1235 generator objects.
1236
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001237- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1238 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001239 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1240 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001241
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001242- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1243 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1244
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001245- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1246 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1247 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1248 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1249 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1250
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001251- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1252 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1253 about 10% faster.
1254
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001255- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1256 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1257
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001258- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1259 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1260 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1261 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1262
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001263Windows
1264-------
1265
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001266- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1267 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1268 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1269 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1270
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001271- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1272 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1273 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1274
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001275
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001276What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1277===============================
1278
1279*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1280
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001281IDLE
1282----
1283
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001284- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1285 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1286 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1287 context-menu actions.
1288
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001289- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1290 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1291 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1292 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1293 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1294 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1295 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1296 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1297 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1298
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001299
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001300What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1301=============================================
1302
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001303*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001304
1305Core and builtins
1306-----------------
1307
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001308- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001309 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001310 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1311
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001312Extension modules
1313-----------------
1314
1315- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1316 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1317 than once. This has been fixed.
1318
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001319- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1320 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1321 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1322 call.
1323
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001324- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1325
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001326Library
1327-------
1328
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001329- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1330 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1331
1332- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1333 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1334 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1335 restored.
1336
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001337IDLE
1338----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001339
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001340- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001341
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001342Build
1343-----
1344
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001345- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1346 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1347
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001348C API
1349-----
1350
1351Windows
1352-------
1353
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001354- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1355 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1356
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001357- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1358
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001359Mac
1360---
1361
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001362- Various fixes to pimp.
1363
1364- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1365
1366- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1367 more problems than it solves.
1368
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001369
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001370What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1371=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001372
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001373*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1374
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001375Core and builtins
1376-----------------
1377
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001378- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1379 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1380
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001381- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1382 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001383 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001384
1385- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1386 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1387 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001388 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001389
1390- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1391 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001392
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001393- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1394 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1395 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1396
1397- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001398 770247.
1399
1400- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001401
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001402Extension modules
1403-----------------
1404
1405- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1406 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1407
1408- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1409
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001410- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1411
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001412- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1413 contained within the _strptime module.
1414
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001415- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1416 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1417
1418- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001419 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1420
1421- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1422 the find_class attribute, if present.
1423
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001424- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001425
1426 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1427 (SF bug 763298).
1428
1429 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001430 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1431 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1432 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001433
1434 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1435
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001436Library
1437-------
1438
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001439- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1440
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001441- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1442 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1443 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1444 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1445 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1446 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1447 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1448 or Tester().
1449
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001450- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1451 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1452 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1453 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1454 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1455 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1456 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1457 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1458 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001459
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001460 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001461
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001462- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1463 weren't before was an oversight.
1464
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001465- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1466 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1467
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001468- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1469 when there are no lines.
1470
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001471- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1472 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1473
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001474- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1475 to child processes.
1476
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001477- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1478
1479- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1480
1481- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1482 xmlrpclib.
1483
1484- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1485 responses.
1486
1487- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1488 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1489
1490- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1491 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1492 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1493
1494- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1495 used as patterns.
1496
1497- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1498 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1499 than Tk 8.3.
1500
1501- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1502
1503- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001504
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001505Tools/Demos
1506-----------
1507
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001508- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1509
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001510- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1511
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001512- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001513
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001514Build
1515-----
1516
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001517- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1518
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001519- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1520
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001521- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1522 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001523
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001524- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1525 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1526 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001527
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001528C API
1529-----
1530
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001531- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1532 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1533
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001534Windows
1535-------
1536
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001537- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1538 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1539 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1540 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1541 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1542 Python exception ::
1543
1544 thread.error: can't start new thread
1545
1546 is raised now.
1547
1548- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1549 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1550 instead of from DLL teardown.
1551
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001552Mac
1553---
1554
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001555- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001556 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001557 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1558 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1559 the executable in the bundle.
1560
1561- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001562
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001563- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1564
1565- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1566 on Panther.
1567
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001568What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1569================================
1570
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001571*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001572
1573Core and builtins
1574-----------------
1575
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001576- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1577 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1578 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1579 with the -i option.
1580
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001581- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1582 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1583
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001584- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1585 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1586
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001587- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1588 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1589 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1590 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1591 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1592 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1593 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1594 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1595 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1596 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1597 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1598 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1599 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001600
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001601- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1602 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1603 embedded in a lambda expression.
1604
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001605- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1606 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1607 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1608 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1609 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1610
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001611- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1612 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1613 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1614
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001615- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1616 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1617
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001618- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1619 It's writable again.
1620
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001621- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1622 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1623 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001624 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001625
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001626- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1627 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1628 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1629
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001630Extension modules
1631-----------------
1632
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001633- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1634 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1635
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001636- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1637 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1638 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1639 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1640
1641- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1642 collection.
1643
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001644- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1645 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1646 unique within a single program run.
1647
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001648- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1649 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1650
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001651- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1652 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1653
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001654- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1655 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001656
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001657- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1658
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001659- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1660 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1661
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001662- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1663 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1664 for many BSD-derived systems.
1665
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001666
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001667Library
1668-------
1669
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001670- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1671 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1672 primary ones:
1673
1674 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1675 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1676 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1677
1678 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1679 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1680 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1681 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1682 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1683 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1684
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001685- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1686 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1687 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1688 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1689 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1690 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1691 argument.
1692
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001693- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1694 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1695 in the archive.
1696
1697- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1698 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1699
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001700- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1701 569574).
1702
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001703- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1704 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1705 no more.
1706
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001707- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1708 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1709 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1710 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1711 code coverage.
1712
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001713- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1714 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1715 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001716 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1717 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001718
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001719- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1720 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1721 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001722 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001723
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001724- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1725
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001726- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1727 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1728 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1729 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1730
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001731- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1732 handling.
1733
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001734- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1735 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1736
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001737- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1738 in socket.py.
1739
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001740- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1741
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001742- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1743 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1744 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1745 opener with proxy support.
1746
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001747- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1748
1749- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1750
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001751Tools/Demos
1752-----------
1753
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001754- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1755
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001756- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1757
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001758- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1759 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001760
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001761- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1762 files.
1763
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001764Build
1765-----
1766
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001767- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001768 different root directory.
1769
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001770C API
1771-----
1772
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001773- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1774 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1775 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1776 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1777 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1778 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1779 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1780 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1781 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1782 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1783
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001784- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1785 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1786 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1787 from Python.
1788
1789
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001790New platforms
1791-------------
1792
1793None this time.
1794
1795Tests
1796-----
1797
1798- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1799 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1800
1801Windows
1802-------
1803
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001804- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1805
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001806- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1807 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1808 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1809 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1810 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1811 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1812 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1813 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1814 that's what it's for.
1815
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001816Mac
1817---
1818
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001819- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1820 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1821 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1822 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001823- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1824 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1825- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001826
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001827SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1828------------------------------------
1829
1830430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1831598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1832622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1833661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1834683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1835697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1836713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1837724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1838727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1839729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1840730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1841731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1842732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1843733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1844735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1845740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1846744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1847745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1848747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1849749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1850751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1851753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1852755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1853757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1854760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1855
1856
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001857What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1858================================
1859
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001860*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001861
1862Core and builtins
1863-----------------
1864
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001865- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1866 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1867
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001868- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1869 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1870 and cannot be strings).
1871
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001872- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1873 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1874 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1875 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1876
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001877- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1878 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1879 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1880 Python itself.
1881
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001882- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1883 the referenced object, if it has one.
1884
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001885- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1886 the thread started at
1887 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1888
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001889- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1890 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1891 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1892 placed on a list index.
1893
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001894- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1895 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1896 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1897 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1898
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001899- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1900 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1901 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1902 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1903 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1904 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1905 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1906
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001907- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1908 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1909 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1910 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1911 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1912
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001913- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1914 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001915
1916- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1917 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1918 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1919 #693195.)
1920
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001921- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1922 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001923
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001924- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001925 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001926 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1927 interpreter executions, would fail.
1928
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001929- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001930 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001931 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001932
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001933Extension modules
1934-----------------
1935
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001936- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1937 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1938 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1939 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1940
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001941- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1942 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1943
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001944- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1945 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1946 and Greg Chapman.)
1947
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001948- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1949 recursively.
1950
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001951- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001952 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1953 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1954 leaks.
1955
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001956- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1957
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001958- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1959 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1960 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1961 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1962 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1963 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1964 #705836.
1965
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001966- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001967 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1968
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001969- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1970 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1971 See SF bug #692416.
1972
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001973- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1974 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1975
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001976- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1977 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1978 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001979
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001980- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001981 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1982 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1983
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001984- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1985 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1986 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1987 timeouts to work properly.
1988
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001989Library
1990-------
1991
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001992- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1993 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1994 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1995 future release.
1996
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001997- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1998 for querying platform dependent features.
1999
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002000- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002001
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002002- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2003 pickle protocol versions.
2004
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002005- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2006 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2007 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2008
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002009- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2010
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002011- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2012 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2013 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2014 modules.
2015
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002016- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2017 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2018 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2019
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002020- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2021 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2022
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002023- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2024 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2025 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2026
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002027- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002028 MS Office extensions.
2029
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002030- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2031 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2032
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002033- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2034 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2035
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002036- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2037 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2038 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2039 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2040 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2041 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2042
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002043- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2044 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2045 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002046
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002047- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2048 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2049 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2050
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002051- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2052
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002053- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2054 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2055 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2056
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002057Tools/Demos
2058-----------
2059
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002060- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2061 See the module docstring for details.
2062
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002063Build
2064-----
2065
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002066- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2067 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002068
2069C API
2070-----
2071
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002072- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2073
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002074- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2075 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2076 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2077
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002078- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2079 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002080
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002081 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2082 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2083 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002084
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002085- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002086 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2087
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002088- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2089 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2090 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002091
2092New platforms
2093-------------
2094
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002095None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002096
2097Tests
2098-----
2099
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002100- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2101 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002102
2103Windows
2104-------
2105
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002106- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2107 function.
2108
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002109- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2110 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002111
2112Mac
2113---
2114
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002115- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2116 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002117
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002118- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2119 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002120
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002121- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2122 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2123 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002124
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002125- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002126 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2127 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002128
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002129- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2130 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002131
2132
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002133What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2134=================================
2135
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002136*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002137
2138Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002139-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002140
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002141- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2142 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2143 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2144
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002145- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2146 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2147 (SF patch #664376.)
2148
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002149- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2150 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2151 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2152 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2153 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2154 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002155 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002156
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002157- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2158 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2159 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2160 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002161 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002162
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002163- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2164 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2165 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2166 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2167 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2168 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2169 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2170 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2171 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2172 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2173 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2174
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002175- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2176 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2177 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2178 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2179 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2180 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2181
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002182- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2183 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2184
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002185- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2186 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2187 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2188 case.)
2189
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002190- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2191 passed as unicode strings.
2192
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002193- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2194 See SF bug #683467.
2195
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002196- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2197 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2198
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002199- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2200
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002201- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2202
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002203- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2204 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2205 arguments.
2206
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002207- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2208 See SF bug #667147.
2209
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002210- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002211 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002212 See SF bug #676155.
2213
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002214- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002215 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002216 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2217 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2218 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2219 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2220 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2221 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002222
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002223Extension modules
2224-----------------
2225
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002226- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2227 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2228 tp_as_number pointer.
2229
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002230- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2231 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2232 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2233 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2234 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2235
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002236- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2237
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002238- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2239
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002240- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002241 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002242 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2243 patch #678531.)
2244
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002245- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2246 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2247
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002248- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2249 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2250
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002251- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2252
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002253- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2254 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2255 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2256
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002257- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2258
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002259- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2260 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2261
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002262- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002263
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002264- datetime changes:
2265
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002266 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2267
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002268 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2269 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2270 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2271 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2272 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2273 now.
2274
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002275 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002276 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2277 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002278
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002279 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002280 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002281 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2282 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2283 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2284 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002285
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002286 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2287 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2288 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002289 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2290
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002291 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2292 by a later example coded by Guido.
2293
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002294 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002295 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2296 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2297 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002298 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2299 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2300
2301 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2302 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2303 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2304 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2305 tzinfo subclass instance.
2306
2307 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2308 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2309 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2310 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2311 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2312 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2313 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2314 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002315
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002316 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2317 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2318 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2319 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2320 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002321 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2322
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002323 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002324
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002325 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2326 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2327 as a naive datetime object.
2328
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002329 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2330 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2331 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2332
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002333 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2334 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2335 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2336 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2337 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2338 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2339 comparison.
2340
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002341 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2342 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2343 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2344 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002345 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002346
2347 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002348
2349 and ::
2350
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002351 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2352
2353 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2354 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2355 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2356 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2357
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002358 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2359 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2360 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2361 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2362 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2363
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002364 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2365 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002366 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2367 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002368
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002369Library
2370-------
2371
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002372- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2373 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2374
2375- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2376 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2377 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2378 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2379 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2380 See PEP 307 for details.
2381
2382- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2383 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2384
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002385- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2386 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002387 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002388 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2389 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002390 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002391
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002392- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2393 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2394
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002395- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2396 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2397 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2398
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002399- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2400
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002401- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2402 exception.
2403
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002404- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2405 class.
2406
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002407- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2408 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2409 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2410
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002411- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2412 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2413
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002414- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002415 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2416 See SF bug #659228.
2417
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002418- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2419 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2420 See SF patch #651082.
2421
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002422- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002423
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002424- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2425 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2426
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002427- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002428 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002429
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002430- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2431 DOS paths from other platforms.
2432
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002433Tools/Demos
2434-----------
2435
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002436- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2437 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2438 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2439 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2440 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2441 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2442 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2443 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2444 example:
2445
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002446 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2447 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002448
2449 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2450
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002451
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002452Build
2453-----
2454
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002455- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2456 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2457 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002458 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2459
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002460 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2461
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002462- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2463 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2464 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2465 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2466 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2467 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2468 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2469 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2470 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2471
2472- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2473 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2474 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2475 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2476
2477- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2478 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2479
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002480C API
2481-----
2482
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002483- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2484 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002485
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002486- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2487 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2488 tp_as_number pointer.
2489
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002490- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2491 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2492 (SF #681367)
2493
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002494- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2495 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2496 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2497 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002498
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002499Tests
2500-----
2501
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002502- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002503 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2504 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2505 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2506 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2507 pydoc.)
2508
2509- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2510
2511- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002512
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002513Windows
2514-------
2515
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002516- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2517 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2518 time).
2519
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002520- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2521 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2522
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002523- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2524 release without strong cryptography.
2525
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002526- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002527 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002528
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002529- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2530 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2531
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002532Mac
2533---
2534
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002535- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2536 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002537
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002538- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2539 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2540 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002541
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002542- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2543 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002544
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002545- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2546 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2547 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2548 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002549
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002550- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002551 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2552 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2553 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002554
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002555
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002556What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002557=================================
2558
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002559*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002560
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002561Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002562--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002563
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002564- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2565
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002566- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2567 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002568 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002569 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002570 a different meaning than before.
2571
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002572- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002573 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002574 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002575
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002576- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002577 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002578 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002579
2580- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2581 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2582 and deallocation.
2583
2584- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2585 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2586
2587- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2588 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2589 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2590 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2591 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2592
2593- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2594 now detected by the garbage collector.
2595
2596- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2597 [SF bug 519621]
2598
2599- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2600 identifier.
2601
2602- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2603 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2604 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2605 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2606 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2607 [SF bug 563060]
2608
2609- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2610 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2611 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2612 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2613 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2614
2615- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2616 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2617 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2618
2619- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2620
2621- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2622 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2623 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2624 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2625 state of the slots would be lost.)
2626
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002627Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002628-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002629
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002630- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002631 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2632 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2633 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2634 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002635 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2636 Jython 2.1.
2637
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002638- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002639 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002640 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2641 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2642 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2643 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2644 these, see PEP 302.
2645
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002646- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2647 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2648 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2649
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002650- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2651 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2652 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2653
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002654- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2655 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2656 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2657
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002658- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2659 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2660 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2661 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2662 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2663 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2664 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2665 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2666 releases or implementations.
2667
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002668- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002669 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2670 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002671
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002672- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2673 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2674
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002675- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2676 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2677 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2678
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002679- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2680 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2681
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002682- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2683 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002684 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2685 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002686
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002687- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2688 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2689 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2690 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2691 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2692
2693 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2694 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2695 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2696 pattern.
2697
2698 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2699 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2700 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2701 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2702
2703 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2704 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2705 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2706 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2707 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2708 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2709
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002710- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2711 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2712 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2713 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2714 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2715 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2716 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2717 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002718
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002719- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2720 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2721 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2722 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2723 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002724 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2725 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2726 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2727 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2728 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2729 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2730 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002731
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002732- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2733 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2734
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002735- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2736 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2737 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2738 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2739 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2740 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2741 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2742 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2743 to Zack Weinberg!
2744
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002745- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2746 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2747 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2748 type. This has been fixed now.
2749
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002750- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2751 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2752 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2753
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002754- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2755 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2756 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2757 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2758 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2759 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2760 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2761 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002762 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002763
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002764- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2765 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2766 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002767
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002768- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2769 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2770 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2771 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2772 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2773 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2774 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2775 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002776 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002777 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2778 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2779
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002780- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2781 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2782 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2783 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2784 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2785 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2786 this.)
2787
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002788- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2789 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002790 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002791 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002792 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2793 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002794 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2795 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002796
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002797- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2798 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2799 currently running.
2800
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002801- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2802 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2803 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2804 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2805
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002806- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2807 as directory names.
2808
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002809- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2810 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2811
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002812- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2813 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2814
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002815- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002816 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2817 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002818
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002819- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2820 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2821 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2822 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2823 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2824
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002825- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2826 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2827 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2828 removed.
2829
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002830- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2831 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2832 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2833
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002834- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2835 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2836 to __debug__.
2837
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002838- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2839 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2840 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2841
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002842- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2843 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2844 deprecated now.
2845
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002846- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2847 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2848 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002849
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002850- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2851 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2852 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2853 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2854 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002855
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002856- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2857 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2858
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002859- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2860 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2861 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002862 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002863 is backward compatible.
2864
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002865- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2866 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2867 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2868 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2869 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2870
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002871- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2872 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2873 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2874 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2875 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2876 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002877
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002878- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2879 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2880
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002881- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2882 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2883
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002884- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2885 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2886 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2887 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2888 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2889
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002890- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2891 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2892 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2893
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002894- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002895 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2896
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002897- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2898 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2899 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002900
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002901- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2902 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2903
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002904- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2905 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2906 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2907
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002908- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2909
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002910Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002911-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002912
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002913- Added three operators to the operator module:
2914 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2915 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2916 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2917
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002918- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2919
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002920- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2921 archives.
2922
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002923- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2924 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2925 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2926
2927 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2928
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002929- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2930 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2931 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002932 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002933
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002934- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2935 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2936 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2937 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002938 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2939 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2940 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2941 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002942
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002943- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2944 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002945
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002946- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2947
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002948- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2949 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2950
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002951- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2952 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2953 supported.
2954
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002955- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2956
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002957- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2958 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002959
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002960- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2961 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2962
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002963- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2964
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002965- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2966 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2967
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002968- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2969 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2970 functions but callable type objects.
2971
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002972- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002973 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002974 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002975
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002976- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2977 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002978
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002979- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2980 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002981
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002982- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2983 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2984 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2985 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2986
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002987- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2988 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002989
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002990- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2991 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2992 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2993 and __imul__.
2994
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002995- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002996 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2997 is called.
2998
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002999- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3000 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3001 interpreter was compiled.
3002
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003003- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3004 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3005 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003006 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003007 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3008 1, not 2.
3009
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003010- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3011 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3012 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3013 limit.
3014
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003015- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3016 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3017 bug #623464.
3018
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003019- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3020 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3021 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3022 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3023
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003024Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003025-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003026
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003027- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3028
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003029- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3030 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3031 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3032 with Python 2.3a2.
3033
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003034- os.path exposes getctime.
3035
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003036- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003037 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003038 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003039 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003040 unit tests of floating point results.
3041
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003042- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3043 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3044 has been increased.
3045
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003046- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3047 executed.
3048
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003049- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3050 postinstallation script.
3051
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003052- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3053 test the current module.
3054
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003055- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003056 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3057 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3058 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3059 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3060
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003061- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003062 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003063 Ward's Optik package.
3064
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003065- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3066 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3067 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3068 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3069
3070- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3071 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003072 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003073
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003074- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3075 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3076 shelf are binary pickles.
3077
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003078- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3079 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3080
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003081- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3082 modules are iterators now.
3083
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003084- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3085 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3086 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3087 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3088 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3089 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003090
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003091- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3092 with their entity value.
3093
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003094- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3095
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003096- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3097 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003098
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003099- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3100 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003101 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003102
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003103- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3104 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3105 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3106 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3107 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3108 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3109 main():
3110
3111 import locale
3112 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3113
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003114- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3115 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3116
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003117- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3118 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3119 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3120 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3121 to the new standard.
3122
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003123- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3124 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3125 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3126 an extension to the database.
3127
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003128- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3129 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3130 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3131 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003132 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003133
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003134- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003135 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003136
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003137- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3138 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3139 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3140 bounded integers.
3141
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003142- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3143 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3144 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3145 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3146 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3147 in existence.
3148
3149 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3150 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3151 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3152 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3153 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3154 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3155
3156 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3157 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3158 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3159 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3160
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003161- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3162 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3163 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3164
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003165- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3166
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003167- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3168 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3169 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3170 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3171
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003172- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3173 argument.
3174
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003175- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3176 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3177 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3178 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3179 [SF patch 560794].
3180
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003181- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3182 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3183 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003184 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3185 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3186 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003187
3188- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3189 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003190
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003191- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3192 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3193 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3194 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003195
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003196- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3197 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3198 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3199 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3200 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3201
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003202- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003203
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003204- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3205
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003206- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3207 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3208 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3209 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3210 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3211 identical to None.
3212
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003213- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3214 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3215 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3216 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3217 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3218 results now.
3219
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003220- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3221 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3222
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003223- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3224 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3225 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3226 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3227 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3228 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3229 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3230 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3231
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003232- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3233
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003234- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3235 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3236
3237- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3238 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3239 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3240 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3241 and other systems.
3242
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003243- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3244 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3245 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3246 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 +00003247 work well with these.
3248
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003249- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3250
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003251- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003252 connections.
3253
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003254- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3255 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3256 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3257
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003258- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3259 sets
3260
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003261- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3262 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3263 name.
3264
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003265- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3266 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3267 passed in.
3268
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003269- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003270 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003271 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3272 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003273
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003274- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3275
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003276- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3277
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003278- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3279 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3280 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3281
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003282- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3283 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3284 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3285 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003286 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003287
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003288- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003289 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003290 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003291
3292- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3293 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3294 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3295
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003296- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003297 the value of its expression argument.
3298
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003299- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3300 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3301 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3302
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003303- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3304 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3305 skipstone browser was included.
3306
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003307- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3308 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3309
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003310Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003311-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003312
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003313- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3314 names in addition to accepting file names.
3315
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003316- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3317 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3318 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3319 still used and useful.)
3320
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003321- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3322 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3323 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3324 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003325
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003326- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3327 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3328 the generated binary.
3329
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003330Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003331-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003332
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003333- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3334
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003335- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3336 except in the hands of experts.
3337
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003338- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003339 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3340 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3341 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003342
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003343- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3344 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3345 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3346 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3347 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3348 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3349 builds.
3350
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003351- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3352 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3353 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3354 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3355 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3356 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3357 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3358 new type.
3359
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003360- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003361
3362 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3363 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3364 positive infinities.
3365
3366 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3367 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3368 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3369 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3370 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3371 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3372 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3373
3374 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3375
3376 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3377
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003378- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3379 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3380 size of the executable.
3381
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003382- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3383 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3384 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3385 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003386
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003387- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3388
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003389- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3390 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3391 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003392
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003393- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3394 well as Unix.
3395
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003396- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3397 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3398 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3399 modules in the README file for details.
3400
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003401C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003402-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003403
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003404- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3405 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003406 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003407 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003408 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003409
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003410- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3411 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3412 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3413 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3414 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3415 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003416 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003417 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3418 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3419 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3420 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3421 aligned.)
3422
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003423- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3424 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3425 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3426
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003427- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3428 level.
3429
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003430- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3431 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3432 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3433 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3434 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3435
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003436- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3437 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3438 code.
3439
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003440- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3441 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3442 adjusting for negative indices.
3443
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003444- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3445 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3446 object.
3447
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003448- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3449 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3450 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3451
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003452- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3453 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003454
3455- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3456
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003457- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3458 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3459 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3460 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3461
3462- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3463
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003464- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003465
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003466- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003467 without going through the buffer API.
3468
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003469- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003470
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003471- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3472 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3473 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3474 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3475
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003476- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3477 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3478
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003479- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003480 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3481
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003482New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003483-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003484
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003485- OpenVMS is now supported.
3486
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003487- AtheOS is now supported.
3488
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003489- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3490
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003491- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3492
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003493Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003494-----
3495
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003496- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3497 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3498 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003499
3500Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003501-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003502
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003503- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3504 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3505 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3506 bugs.
3507 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003508 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003509 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3510 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003511 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003512
3513- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003514 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003515
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003516- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3517 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3518
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003519- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3520 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003521 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003522 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3523
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003524- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3525 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3526 use files" uninstall option).
3527
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003528- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3529
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003530- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3531 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3532
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003533- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3534 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3535 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3536
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003537- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3538 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3539 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3540 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3541 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003542 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3543 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3544 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003545
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003546- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003547 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003548 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3549 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3550 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3551 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3552 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3553 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3554 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3555 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3556 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3557 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3558 work around.
3559
3560- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3561 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3562 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3563 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3564 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3565 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3566 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3567 specified with O_CREAT too).
3568
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003569Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003570----
3571
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003572- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003573
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003574- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3575 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3576 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3577
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003578- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3579 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3580 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3581
3582- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3583 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3584 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3585 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3586 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3587 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3588 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3589 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003590
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003591- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3592 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3593 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003594
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003595- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3596 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3597 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3598 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3599 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003600
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003601- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3602 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3603 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003604
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003605- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3606 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003607
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003608- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3609 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3610 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3611 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3612 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003613
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003614- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3615 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3616 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3617
3618- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3619 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3620 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003621
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003622- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3623 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3624 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3625 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003626 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003627
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003628- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3629 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003630
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003631- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3632 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003633
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003634- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003635 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003636 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3637 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003638
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003639
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003640What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003641===============================
3642
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003643*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3644
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003645Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003646--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003647
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003648- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3649 with a custom metaclass.
3650
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003651Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003652-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003653
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003654- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3655 are proxies.
3656
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003657Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003658-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003659
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003660- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3661 very short strings.
3662
3663- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3664 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3665 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3666 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3667 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3668
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003669Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003670-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003671
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003672- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3673 close or delete time).
3674
3675- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3676 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3677
3678- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3679
3680- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003681 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003682
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003683Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003684-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003685
3686Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003687-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003688
3689C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003690-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003691
3692New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003693-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003694
3695Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003696-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003697
3698Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003699-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003700
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003701- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3702
3703- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3704 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3705
3706- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3707 deleted at process exit time.
3708
3709- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3710 in backslash.
3711
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003712Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003713----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003714
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003715- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3716 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3717 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3718
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003719
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003720What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003721===========================
3722
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003723*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3724
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003725Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003726--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003727
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003728- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3729 been extensively updated. See
3730
3731 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3732
3733 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3734
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003735- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3736 deleted!
3737
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003738- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3739 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3740 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3741 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3742 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3743
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003744- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3745
3746 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3747 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3748
3749 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3750 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3751 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3752 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3753 supported anyway.
3754
3755 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3756 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3757
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003758- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3759 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3760 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3761 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3762 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003763
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003764- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3765 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3766 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3767
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003768Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003769-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003770
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003771- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3772 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3773 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3774 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3775 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3776 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003777 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3778 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3779 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3780 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003781
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003782- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3783 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3784 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3785
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003786Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003787-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003788
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003789- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3790
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003791Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003792-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003793
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003794- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3795 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3796 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3797 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3798 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3799 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3800
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003801- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3802
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003803- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3804
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003805- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3806
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003807- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3808 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3809 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3810
3811- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3812
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003813Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003814-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003815
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003816- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3817 off a search on Google.
3818
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003819Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003820-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003821
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003822- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3823 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3824 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3825 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3826 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3827 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3828 other platforms should do likewise.
3829
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003830- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3831 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3832 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3833
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003834C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003835-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003836
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003837- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3838 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3839 producing key-value pairs.
3840
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003841- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003842 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003843 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3844 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3845 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3846 previously went unchallenged.
3847
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003848New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003849-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003850
3851Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003852-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003853
3854Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003855-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003856
3857Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003858----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003859
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003860- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3861 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003862
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003863- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3864 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3865 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3866 home.
3867
3868
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003869What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003870===========================
3871
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003872*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3873
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003874Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003875--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003876
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003877- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3878 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003879
3880 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003881 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003882
3883 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3884 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003885 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003886 This needs to be documented.
3887
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003888- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3889 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3890
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003891- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3892 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3893 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3894
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003895- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3896 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3897
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003898- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3899 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3900 class forbids it).
3901
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003902- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3903 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3904 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3905
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003906- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3907
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003908Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003909-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003910
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003911- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3912 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003913 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003914
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003915- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3916 (like 1 + '').
3917
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003918Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003919-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003920
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003921- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3922 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3923 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3924 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003925 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003926 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3927
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003928- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3929 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3930 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3931 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3932
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003933- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3934 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003935 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3936 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3937 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003938
3939- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3940 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003941
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003942- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3943 bytes on its input.
3944
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003945Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003946-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003947
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003948- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003949 convenience function.
3950
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003951- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3952 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3953 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003954 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3955 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3956 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3957 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3958 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3959 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003960
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003961- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3962 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3963 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3964 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3965
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003966- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3967 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3968 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3969
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003970- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3971 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3972 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3973 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3974
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003975- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3976 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003977 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003978 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3979 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3980 new -l and -e options.
3981
3982- statcache is now deprecated.
3983
3984- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3985 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003986 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003987 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3988 time properly taken into account.
3989
3990- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3991 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3992 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3993 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3994
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003995Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003996-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003997
3998Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003999-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004000
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004001- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4002 is built with libdb3 if available.
4003
4004- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4005
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004006C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004007-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004008
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004009- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4010 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4011 PySequence_Size().
4012
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004013- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4014
4015- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4016 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4017 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4018
4019- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4020 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4021
4022- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4023 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4024
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004025New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004026-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004027
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004028- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4029 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4030
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004031- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4032 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4033
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004034- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4035
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004036Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004037-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004038
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004039- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4040 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4041
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004042Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004043-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004044
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004045Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004046----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004047
4048- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4049 removed completely in the next release.
4050
4051- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4052 OSX.
4053
4054- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4055 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4056
4057- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4058
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004059
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004060What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004061===========================
4062
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004063*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4064
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004065Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004066--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004067
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004068- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004069 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004070 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004071 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4072 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004073 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4074 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004075 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4076 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004077
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004078- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4079 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4080
4081- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4082 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4083
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004084Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004085-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004086
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004087- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4088 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4089 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4090 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4091 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4092 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4093 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4094 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4095
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004096- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4097 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4098 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4099 example).
4100
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004101- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004102 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004103 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004104 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004105
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004106- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4107 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4108 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004109 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004110
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004111- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4112 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4113 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4114 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4115 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4116 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4117
4118 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4119
4120 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4121
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004122Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004124
4125- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4126
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004127- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4128
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004129- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4130 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004131
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004132- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4133 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4134 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4135 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4136 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4137 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004138 attributes.
4139
4140- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4141 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4142 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004143
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004144- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4145 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4146 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004147
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004148- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4149 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4150 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004151 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4152 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4153
4154- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4155 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004156
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004157Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004158-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004159
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004160- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4161 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4162
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004163- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4164 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4165 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4166 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4167
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004168- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4169 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4170 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4171 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4172
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004173 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4174 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4175 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4176 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4177 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4178 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4179 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4180 without losing information).
4181
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004182- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004183 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4184 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4185 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4186 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4187 module).
4188
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004189 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004190 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4191 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4192 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4193 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004194
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004195- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004196 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4197 encoding.
4198
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004199- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4200 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4201
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004202- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004203 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4204
4205- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4206 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4207 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4208 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4209
4210- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4211
4212- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4213 ON, and OFF.
4214
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004215- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4216 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4217
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004218Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004219-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004220
4221- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4222 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4223 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004224
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004225- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4226 been added: -X and -E.
4227
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004228Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004229-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004230
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004231- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4232 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4233
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004234C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004235-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004236
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004237- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4238 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4239 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4240 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4241 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4242
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004243- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4244 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4245 as long) arguments.
4246
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004247- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4248 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4249 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4250 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4251 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4252 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4253
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004254- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4255 input.
4256
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004257New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004258-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004259
4260Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004261-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004262
4263Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004264-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004265
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004266- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4267 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4268 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4269
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004270- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4271 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4272 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004273 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004274
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004275 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4276 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4277 import signal
4278 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004279
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004280 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004281 while 1:
4282 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004283 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004284 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4285 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4286 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4287 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004288
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004289
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004290What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4291===========================
4292
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004293*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4294
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004295Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004296--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004297
4298- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4299 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4300 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4301
4302- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4303 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4304 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4305 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4306 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4307 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4308 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004309
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004310- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004311 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004312 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4313 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4314 associate a docstring with a property.
4315
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004316- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4317 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4318 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4319 other built-in object types.
4320
4321- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4322 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4323 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4324 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4325 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4326
4327- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4328 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4329
4330- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4331 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004332 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004333 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4334 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4335 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4336 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4337 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4338
4339- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4340 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4341 class.
4342
4343- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4344 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4345 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4346 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4347
4348- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4349 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4350 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4351 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4352
4353- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4354 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4355
4356- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4357 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4358 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4359 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4360 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004361 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004362 with the same value as s.
4363
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004364- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4365
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004366Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004367----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004368
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004369- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4370
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004371- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4372 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4373 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4374 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4375 objects.
4376
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004377- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4378 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004379 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4380 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4381
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004382- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4383 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4384 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4385
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004386Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004387-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004388
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004389- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4390 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4391 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4392 by the instances.
4393
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004394- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4395 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4396 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4397
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004398- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4399 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4400 before the entire comparison is complete.
4401
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004402- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4403 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4404 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4405
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004406- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4407 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4408 getwriter().
4409
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004410- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4411 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4412
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004413- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004414 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4415 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4416
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004417- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4418 iterable object.
4419
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004420- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4421 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004422
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004423- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4424 authentication.
4425
4426- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4427 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004428
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004429- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004430 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4431 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4432 a sample driver.)
4433
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004434Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004435-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004436
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004437- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4438 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4439 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4440 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4441 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4442 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4443 kernel has large file support.
4444
4445- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4446 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4447 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4448 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4449 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4450
4451- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4452 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4453 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4454
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004455C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004456-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004457
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004458- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4459 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4460
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004461New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004462-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004463
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004464- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4465 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4466
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004467Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004468-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004469
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004470- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4471 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4472 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4473 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4474 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4475
4476- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4477 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4478 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4479 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4480
4481- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4482 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4483
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004484Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004485-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004486
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004487- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004488 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4489 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004490
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004491
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004492What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4493===========================
4494
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004495*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4496
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004497Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004498----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004499
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004500- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4501 big to represent as a C double.
4502
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004503- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4504 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4505 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4506 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4507 restriction).
4508
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004509- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4510 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4511 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4512 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4513 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4514
4515 >>> dir([])
4516 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4517 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4518 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4519 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4520 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4521 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4522 'reverse', 'sort']
4523
4524 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4525
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004526- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004527 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4528 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4529 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4530 OverflowError exception.
4531
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004532- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004533 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004534 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4535 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4536 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4537 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4538 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004539 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4541 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4542
4543 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4544 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4545 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4546 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004547
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004548- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004549 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4550 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4551 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4552 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4553 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4554 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4555 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4556 once it is created.
4557
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004558- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4559 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4560 (key, value) pairs.
4561
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004562- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004563 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4564 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4565
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004566- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4567 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4568 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4569 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4570 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004571
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004572- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004573 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4574 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4575
4576 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4577
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004578- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004579 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4580
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004581Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004582-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004583
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004584- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004585 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4586 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004587
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004588- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4589 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4590 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4591 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4592 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4593 in this area anymore).
4594
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004595- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4596 threading.Timer.
4597
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004598- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4599 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4600
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004601- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004602 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4603
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004604- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004605 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4606 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4607 converted to Python longs.
4608
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004609- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004610 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4611
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004612- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4613 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4614 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4615
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004616Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004617-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004618
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004619- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4620 division operators as per PEP 238.
4621
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004622Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004623-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004624
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004625- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4626 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4627 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4628 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4629
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004630C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004631-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004632
4633- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004634
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004635- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4636 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004637 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004638
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004639 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4640 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004641 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004642 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004643
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004644- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004645 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4646 module:
4647
4648 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004649
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004650 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4651 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004652
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004653 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4654 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004655
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004656 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4657
4658 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4659
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004660- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004661 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4662 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4663 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004664
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004665New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004666-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004667
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004668- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4669 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4670 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4671 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4672 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004673
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004674Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004675-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004676
4677Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004678-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004679
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004680- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4681 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4682 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4683 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004684 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4685 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4686 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4687 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4688 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004689
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004690- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004691 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4692
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004693
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004694What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4695===========================
4696
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004697*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4698
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004699Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004700-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004701
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004702- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4703 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4704
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004705- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4706 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4707 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004708
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004709- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4710 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4711 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4712 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004713
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004714- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4715
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004716- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004717
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004718Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004719-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004720
4721- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004722 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004723 the module docstring for details.
4724
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004725Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004726-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004727
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004728- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004729 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4730 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4731 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004732
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004733- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4734 Nick Mathewson.
4735
4736Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004737----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004738
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004739- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4740 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4741 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4742 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4743 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4744 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4745 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4746 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4747
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004748- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4749 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4750 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4751 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4752
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004753- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4754 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4755 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4756 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4757 come a long way).
4758
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004759- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4760 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4761 write filters for these warnings).
4762
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004763- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4764 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4765 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4766 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4767 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4768
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004769- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4770 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4771 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4772 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4773 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4774 older distribution.
4775
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004776Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004777-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004778
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004779- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4780 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004781 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004782
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004783- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4784 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4785 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4786
4787- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4788
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004789- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4790
4791- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4792
4793- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4794
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004795- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004796
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004797- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4798
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004799New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004800-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004801
4802C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004803-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004804
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004805- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4806 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4807 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4808 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4809 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4810 against buffer overruns.
4811
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004812- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004813 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4814 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004815 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4816 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4817 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4818
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004819- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4820 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4821 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4822 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4823 deprecated.
4824
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004825Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004826-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004827
4828- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4829 relevant is found.
4830
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004831
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004832What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004833===========================
4834
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004835*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4836
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004837Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004838----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004839
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004840- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4841 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4842 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4843 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4844 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4845 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4846 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4847 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004848 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004849 repaired.
4850
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004851- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004852 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004853 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4854 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4855 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4856 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4857 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4858 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4859 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4860 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4861
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004862- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4863 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4864 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4865 leading BMO character).
4866
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004867- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4868 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4869 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4870
4871 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4872 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4873 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004874
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004875 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4876 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4877 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4878 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4879 for various simple to use conversions.
4880
4881 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4882 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4883
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004884 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4885 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4886 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4887 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4888 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4889 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4890 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4891 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4892 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4893 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4894 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4895 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4896 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4897 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4898 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004899
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004900- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4901 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4902 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004903 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004904 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004905
4906 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004907 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4908 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4909 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4910 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4911 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004912 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4913 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004914
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004915 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4916 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4917 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004918 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004919
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004920- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4921 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4922 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4923 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4924 floating arithmetic,
4925
4926 x = 9007199254740992.0
4927 print long(x)
4928
4929 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4930 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4931 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4932 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4933 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4934 functions are of good quality).
4935
4936 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4937 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4938 algorithms to break.
4939
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004940- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4941 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4942 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4943 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4944 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4945 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4946 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4947 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4948 order.
4949
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004950- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4951 operation along the most common code paths.
4952
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004953- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4954 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4955
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004956- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4957 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4958 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4959 {}.update(UserDict())
4960
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004961- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4962 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4963 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4964 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4965 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4966 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4967 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4968 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4969
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004970- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004971 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004972
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004973 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004974 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4975 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004976 join() method of strings
4977 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004978 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4979 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004980 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004981 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004982
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004983- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4984 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4985
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004986- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4987 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4988
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004989- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4990 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4991 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4992 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4993
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004994- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4995 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004996 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004997 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4998 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004999
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005000- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5001
5002
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005003Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005004-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005005
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005006- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005007 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005008 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5009 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5010
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005011- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5012 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5013
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005014- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5015 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5016 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5017 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5018
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005019- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5020 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5021 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5022
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005023- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5024
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005025- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5026
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005027- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5028 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5029 that are still imported into string.py).
5030
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005031- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5032
5033- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5034 Now it does.
5035
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005036- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5037
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005038- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5039 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5040 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5041 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5042 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005043 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5044 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005045
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005046- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5047 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5048 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5049 'help(object)'.
5050
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005051Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005052-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005053
5054- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005055 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005056 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5057 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5058
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005059- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005060 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5061 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005062
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005063C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005064-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005065
5066- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5067 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005068
5069----
5070
5071**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**