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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
15...
16
17Extension modules
18-----------------
19
20...
21
22Library
23-------
24
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +000025- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
26
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +000027- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
28 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
29 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
30 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
31 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
32 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
33 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
34 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
35 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
36
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000037- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
38 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +000039 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000040
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000041- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
42 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
43 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
44 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
45 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
46 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
47 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
48 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000049
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +000050- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000051 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
52 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
53 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
54 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
55 integration features instead. It would help if those were documented.
56
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +000057- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
58
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000059Build
60-----
61
62...
63
64C API
65-----
66
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000067- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
68 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
69 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000070
71Documentation
72-------------
73
74...
75
76Tests
77-----
78
79- test__locale ported to unittest
80
81Windows
82-------
83
84...
85
86Mac
87---
88
89...
90
91New platforms
92-------------
93
94...
95
96Tools/Demos
97-----------
98
99...
100
101
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000102What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
103=================================
104
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000105*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000106
107Core and builtins
108-----------------
109
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000110- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000111 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
112
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000113- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
114 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
115 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
116 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
117 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
118 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
119 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
120 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000121 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
122 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
123 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
124 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
125 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000126
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000127- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
128 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
129 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
130 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
131 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
132
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000133- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
134
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000135- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
136 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
137
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000138- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
139 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
140 modified the list.
141
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000142- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
143 functions is now writable.
144
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000145- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
146 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
147 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
148 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
149
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000150- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
151 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
152 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
153 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
154 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000155
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000156- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
157 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
158
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000159Extension modules
160-----------------
161
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000162- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
163
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000164- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
165 data.
166
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000167- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
168 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
169 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
170 supposed to have been truncated away.
171
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000172- Added socket.socketpair().
173
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000174- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
175 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
176
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000177- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000178 versions of Python, have now been removed.
179
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000180Library
181-------
182
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000183- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000184 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000185
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000186- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
187 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
188
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000189- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
190 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
191
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000192- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
193
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000194- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
195 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000196
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000197- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
198 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
199
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000200- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
201
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000202- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
203
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000204- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
205
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000206- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
207 Percivall.
208
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000209- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
210 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
211
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000212- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
213 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
214 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000215 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000216
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000217- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
218 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
219 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
220 and exponent.
221
222- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
223
224- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
225 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
226 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
227
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000228- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
229 to the readline module.
230
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000231- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000232 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
233 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000234
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000235- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
236 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
237 contains symlinks.
238
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000239- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
240 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
241
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000242- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
243 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
244 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
245
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000246- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
247 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
248 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
249 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
250 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
251 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
252 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
253 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
254 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
255 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
256 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
257 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
258 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
259
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000260- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
261
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000262Tools/Demos
263-----------
264
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000265- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
266 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
267
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000268- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
269
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000270Build
271-----
272
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000273- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
274 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
275 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
276 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
277 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
278 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
279 plans to do so.
280
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000281- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
282 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
283
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000284- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
285 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
286
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000287- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
288 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
289
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000290- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
291 GNU/k*BSD systems.
292
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000293- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
294 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
295
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000296C API
297-----
298
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000299..
300
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000301Documentation
302-------------
303
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000304- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
305 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
306
307- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
308 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
309 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000310
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000311New platforms
312-------------
313
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000314- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
315
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000316Tests
317-----
318
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000319..
320
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000321Windows
322-------
323
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000324- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
325 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
326 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
327 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
328 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
329 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
330 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
331 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
332 the problem.
333
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000334Mac
335---
336
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000337..
338
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000339
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000340What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
341=================================
342
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000343*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000344
345Core and builtins
346-----------------
347
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000348- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
349 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
350 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
351 sensitive code.
352
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000353- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000354 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000355
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000356 @staticmethod
357 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000358
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000359 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000360
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000361- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
362 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
363 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
364 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
365 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
366 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
367 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
368 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
369 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
370 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
371 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
372
373 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
374 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
375 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
376 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
377 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
378 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
379 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
380
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000381- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
382 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
383
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000384- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000385 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000386
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000387- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000388 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000389 which was missing for no apparent reason.
390
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000391- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000392 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
393 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
394
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000395- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
396 types that support garbage collection.
397
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000398- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
399
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000400- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
401 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
402 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
403 Jython.
404
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000405- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
406
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000407- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
408 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
409
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000410- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
411 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
412 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000413
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000414- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
415 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
416 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
417
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000418Extension modules
419-----------------
420
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000421- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
422
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000423Library
424-------
425
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000426- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
427 TIS-620
428
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000429- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
430 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
431 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
432 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
433 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
434 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
435 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
436 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
437 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
438 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
439
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000440- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
441
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000442- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
443 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
444 same as when the argument is omitted).
445 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
446
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000447- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
448
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000449- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
450 schemes are offered.
451
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000452- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
453
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000454- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
455 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
456 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
457
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000458- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
459
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000460- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
461 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
462
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000463- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
464 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
465 when dummy_threading is being used.
466
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000467- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
468 from a tarfile.
469
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000470- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000471 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000472
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000473- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
474 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
475 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
476 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
477
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000478- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
479 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
480
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000481- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
482 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
483 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
484 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
485 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
486 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
487 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
488 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
489 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
490 by some other method in progress).
491
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000492- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
493 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
494 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000495
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000496- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
497
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000498- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
499 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
500 AM Kuchling.
501
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000502- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
503 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
504 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
505
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000506- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
507 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
508 instead of unsigned.
509
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000510- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000511 no longer part of the public API.
512
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000513- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
514 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
515 string methods of the same name).
516
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000517- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000518 SF patch 945642.
519
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000520- doctest unittest integration improvements:
521
522 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
523
524 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
525 DocTestSuites.
526
527- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
528 that provide thread-local data.
529
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000530- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
531 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
532
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000533- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
534
535- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
536 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
537 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
538
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000539- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
540
541 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
542 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
543 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000544
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000545 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
546 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
547 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
548 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
549
550 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
551 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
552
553 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
554 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
555 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
556 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
557
558 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
559 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
560 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
561 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
562 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
563
564 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
565 wrapping help output.
566
567 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
568 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
569 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000570
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000571C API
572-----
573
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000574- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
575 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
576 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
577 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
578 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
579 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
580 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
581 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
582 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
583 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
584 its visible semantics have not changed.
585
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000586- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
587 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
588
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000589Documentation
590-------------
591
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000592- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000593
594 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000595 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000596
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000597 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000598
599 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
600
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000601- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000602
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000603Tests
604-----
605
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000606- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000607 platforms that use the Makefile.
608
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000609- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
610 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
611 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
612
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000613
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000614What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
615=================================
616
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000617*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000618
619Core and builtins
620-----------------
621
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000622- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
623 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
624 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
625 objects now (one object instead of three).
626
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000627- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
628 Windows DLLs.
629
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000630- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
631 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000632
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000633- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
634 a new .pyc magic.
635
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000636- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
637 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
638 be there.
639
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000640- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
641 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
642 the LC_NUMERIC category.
643
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000644- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
645 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
646 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
647
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000648- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
649
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000650- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
651 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
652 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000653
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000654- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
655 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
656
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000657- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
658
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000659- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000660 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000661
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000662- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
663
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000664- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
665
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000666- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
667 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
668
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000669- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
670 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
671 Fixes bug #858016 .
672
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000673- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
674 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
675 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
676
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000677- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
678 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
679 improves their performance (about 35%).
680
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000681- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
682 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
683 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
684
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000685- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
686 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
687 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
688 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
689
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000690- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
691 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
692 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
693 length is not known).
694
695- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
696 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000697 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
698 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000699 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
700
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000701- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
702 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
703
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000704- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
705 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
706 keyword arguments.
707
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000708- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
709 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
710 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
711
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000712- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
713 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
714 cases.
715
716- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
717 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
718 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
719 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
720 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
721 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
722 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
723 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
724 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
725 a release build.
726
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000727- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
728 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
729
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000730- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000731 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000732
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000733- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
734 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
735 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
736 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
737 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
738 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
739 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
740 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
741 destroyed.
742
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000743- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
744 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
745 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
746 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
747 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
748 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
749 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
750 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
751
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000752- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
753 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
754 character other than a space.
755
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000756- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
757 by the function object or by the method object, the function
758 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
759 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
760 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
761 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
762 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
763 attributes with the same name.
764
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000765- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
766 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
767 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
768 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
769 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
770 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
771 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
772 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
773 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
774 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
775 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
776 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
777 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
778 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000779
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000780- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
781 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
782 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
783 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
784 This has been repaired.
785
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000786- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
787
788- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
789
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000790- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
791 over a sequence.
792
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000793- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000794 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000795
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000796- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
797
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000798- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
799 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
800 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
801 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
802 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
803 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
804 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
805 records with equal keys is unchanged).
806
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000807- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
808 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
809 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
810
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000811- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
812 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
813 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
814 freelist.
815
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000816- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
817 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
818
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000819- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
820 number.
821
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000822- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
823 a TypeError exception.
824
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000825- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
826 820195.
827
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000828- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
829 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
830 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
831
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000832- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000833 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
834 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000835
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000836- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
837 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
838 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
839
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000840- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
841 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000842 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000843
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000844- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000845 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
846 the first call.
847
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000848
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000849Extension modules
850-----------------
851
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000852- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
853 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
854
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000855- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
856 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
857 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
858 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
859 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
860 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
861 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000862
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000863- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
864
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000865- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
866
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000867- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
868 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
869
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000870- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
871 fewer false positives.
872
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000873- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
874 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
875
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000876- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000877 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
878
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000879- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000880 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000881 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000882 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
883 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000884
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000885- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
886 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
887 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
888 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
889
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000890- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
891 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
892 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
893 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
894 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
895 #897625.
896
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000897- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
898 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
899
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000900- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
901 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
902 and pops on either side of the deque.
903
904- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
905 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
906
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000907- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
908 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
909 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
910 other functions that expect a function argument.
911
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000912- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
913
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000914- os.getsid was added.
915
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000916- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
917 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
918 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
919
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000920- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
921
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000922- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
923
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000924- readline.clear_history was added.
925
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000926- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
927
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000928- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
929
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000930- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
931
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000932- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
933
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000934- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
935
936- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
937
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000938- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
939
940- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
941
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000942- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
943 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
944 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
945
946- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
947 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
948 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
949 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
950 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
951 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
952 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
953
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000954- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
955 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
956 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
957 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000958
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000959- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000960 iterators from a single iterable.
961
962- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
963 of raising a TypeError exception.
964
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000965- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
966 as parameter.
967
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000968Library
969-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000970
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000971- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
972 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
973 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000974
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000975- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
976 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
977 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000978
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000979- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000980
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000981- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
982 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000983
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000984- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
985 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
986
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000987- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
988
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000989- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000990 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000991
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000992- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000993 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000994
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000995- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
996
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000997- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
998 on cygwin and mingw32.
999
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001000- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1001
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001002- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1003 module.
1004
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001005- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1006 installation scheme for all platforms.
1007
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001008- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001009 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001010
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001011- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1012 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1013 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1014
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001015- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1016 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1017 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1018
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001019- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1020
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001021- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1022
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001023- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1024 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1025
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001026- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1027 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1028 type pattern with the same value exists.
1029
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001030- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1031 when run from the command prompt).
1032
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001033- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1034 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1035
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001036- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1037 default sort).
1038
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001039- Added global runctx function to profile module
1040
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001041- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1042
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001043- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1044
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001045- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1046
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001047- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001048 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1049 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1050 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1051 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1052 accordingly.
1053
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001054- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1055 decoding standards.
1056
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001057- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1058 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1059 called for all requests.
1060
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001061- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1062 they are passed to the compiler.
1063
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001064- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1065 indent, width and depth.
1066
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001067- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1068 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1069
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001070- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1071 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1072
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001073- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1074
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001075- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1076
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001077- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1078
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001079- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1080 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1081
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001082- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001083 for better performance.
1084
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001085- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001086
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001087- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1088 a string).
1089
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001090- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1091
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001092- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1093
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001094- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1095
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001096- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1097
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001098- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1099 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1100 list of fieldnames.
1101
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001102- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1103 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1104
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001105- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1106
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001107- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1108 empty lists.
1109
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001110- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1111 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1112 and shelves.
1113
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001114- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1115 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1116
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001117- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001118 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1119 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001120
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001121- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1122 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001123 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001124
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001125- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001126 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1127 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1128
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001129- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1130 and removed in Py2.4.
1131
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001132- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1133
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001134- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1135
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001136Tools/Demos
1137-----------
1138
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001139- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1140 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1141
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001142- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1143
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001144- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1145 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1146 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1147 destination in situations where both files are given.
1148
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001149- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1150 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1151 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1152 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1153
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001154- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1155
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001156- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1157 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1158 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1159 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1160 now.
1161
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001162- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1163 in effect
1164
1165- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1166 C-c C-h
1167
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001168- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1169 -d option was given.
1170
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001171Build
1172-----
1173
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001174- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1175 build under OS X.
1176
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001177- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1178 --enable-profiling.
1179
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001180- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1181 is configured --with-tsc.
1182
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001183- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1184 on AMD64.
1185
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001186- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1187 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1188
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001189- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1190 removed.
1191
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001192- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1193 supported (see PEP 11).
1194
1195- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1196
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001197- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1198
1199- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1200 (see PEP 11).
1201
1202- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1203 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1204
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001205C API
1206-----
1207
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001208- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1209 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1210 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1211
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001212- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1213 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1214 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1215 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1216
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001217- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1218 generator objects.
1219
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001220- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1221 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001222 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1223 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001224
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001225- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1226 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1227
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001228- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1229 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1230 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1231 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1232 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1233
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001234- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1235 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1236 about 10% faster.
1237
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001238- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1239 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1240
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001241- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1242 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1243 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1244 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1245
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001246Windows
1247-------
1248
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001249- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1250 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1251 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1252 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1253
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001254- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1255 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1256 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1257
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001258
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001259What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1260===============================
1261
1262*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1263
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001264IDLE
1265----
1266
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001267- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1268 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1269 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1270 context-menu actions.
1271
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001272- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1273 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1274 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1275 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1276 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1277 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1278 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1279 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1280 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1281
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001282
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001283What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1284=============================================
1285
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001286*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001287
1288Core and builtins
1289-----------------
1290
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001291- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001292 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001293 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1294
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001295Extension modules
1296-----------------
1297
1298- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1299 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1300 than once. This has been fixed.
1301
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001302- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1303 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1304 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1305 call.
1306
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001307- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1308
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001309Library
1310-------
1311
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001312- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1313 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1314
1315- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1316 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1317 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1318 restored.
1319
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001320IDLE
1321----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001322
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001323- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001324
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001325Build
1326-----
1327
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001328- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1329 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1330
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001331C API
1332-----
1333
1334Windows
1335-------
1336
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001337- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1338 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1339
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001340- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1341
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001342Mac
1343---
1344
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001345- Various fixes to pimp.
1346
1347- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1348
1349- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1350 more problems than it solves.
1351
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001352
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001353What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1354=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001355
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001356*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1357
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001358Core and builtins
1359-----------------
1360
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001361- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1362 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1363
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001364- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1365 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001366 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001367
1368- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1369 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1370 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001371 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001372
1373- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1374 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001375
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001376- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1377 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1378 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1379
1380- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001381 770247.
1382
1383- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001384
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001385Extension modules
1386-----------------
1387
1388- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1389 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1390
1391- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1392
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001393- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1394
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001395- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1396 contained within the _strptime module.
1397
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001398- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1399 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1400
1401- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001402 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1403
1404- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1405 the find_class attribute, if present.
1406
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001407- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001408
1409 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1410 (SF bug 763298).
1411
1412 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001413 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1414 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1415 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001416
1417 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1418
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001419Library
1420-------
1421
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001422- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1423
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001424- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1425 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1426 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1427 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1428 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1429 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1430 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1431 or Tester().
1432
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001433- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1434 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1435 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1436 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1437 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1438 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1439 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1440 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1441 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001442
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001443 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001444
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001445- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1446 weren't before was an oversight.
1447
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001448- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1449 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1450
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001451- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1452 when there are no lines.
1453
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001454- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1455 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1456
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001457- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1458 to child processes.
1459
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001460- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1461
1462- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1463
1464- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1465 xmlrpclib.
1466
1467- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1468 responses.
1469
1470- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1471 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1472
1473- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1474 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1475 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1476
1477- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1478 used as patterns.
1479
1480- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1481 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1482 than Tk 8.3.
1483
1484- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1485
1486- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001487
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001488Tools/Demos
1489-----------
1490
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001491- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1492
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001493- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1494
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001495- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001496
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001497Build
1498-----
1499
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001500- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1501
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001502- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1503
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001504- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1505 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001506
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001507- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1508 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1509 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001510
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001511C API
1512-----
1513
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001514- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1515 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1516
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001517Windows
1518-------
1519
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001520- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1521 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1522 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1523 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1524 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1525 Python exception ::
1526
1527 thread.error: can't start new thread
1528
1529 is raised now.
1530
1531- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1532 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1533 instead of from DLL teardown.
1534
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001535Mac
1536---
1537
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001538- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001539 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001540 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1541 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1542 the executable in the bundle.
1543
1544- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001545
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001546- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1547
1548- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1549 on Panther.
1550
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001551What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1552================================
1553
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001554*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001555
1556Core and builtins
1557-----------------
1558
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001559- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1560 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1561 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1562 with the -i option.
1563
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001564- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1565 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1566
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001567- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1568 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1569
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001570- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1571 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1572 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1573 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1574 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1575 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1576 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1577 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1578 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1579 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1580 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1581 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1582 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001583
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001584- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1585 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1586 embedded in a lambda expression.
1587
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001588- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1589 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1590 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1591 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1592 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1593
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001594- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1595 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1596 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1597
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001598- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1599 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1600
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001601- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1602 It's writable again.
1603
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001604- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1605 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1606 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001607 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001608
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001609- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1610 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1611 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1612
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001613Extension modules
1614-----------------
1615
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001616- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1617 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1618
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001619- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1620 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1621 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1622 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1623
1624- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1625 collection.
1626
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001627- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1628 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1629 unique within a single program run.
1630
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001631- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1632 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1633
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001634- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1635 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1636
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001637- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1638 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001639
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001640- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1641
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001642- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1643 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1644
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001645- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1646 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1647 for many BSD-derived systems.
1648
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001649
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001650Library
1651-------
1652
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001653- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1654 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1655 primary ones:
1656
1657 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1658 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1659 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1660
1661 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1662 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1663 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1664 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1665 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1666 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1667
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001668- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1669 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1670 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1671 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1672 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1673 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1674 argument.
1675
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001676- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1677 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1678 in the archive.
1679
1680- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1681 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1682
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001683- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1684 569574).
1685
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001686- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1687 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1688 no more.
1689
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001690- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1691 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1692 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1693 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1694 code coverage.
1695
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001696- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1697 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1698 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001699 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1700 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001701
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001702- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1703 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1704 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001705 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001706
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001707- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1708
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001709- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1710 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1711 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1712 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1713
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001714- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1715 handling.
1716
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001717- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1718 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1719
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001720- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1721 in socket.py.
1722
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001723- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1724
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001725- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1726 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1727 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1728 opener with proxy support.
1729
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001730- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1731
1732- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1733
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001734Tools/Demos
1735-----------
1736
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001737- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1738
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001739- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1740
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001741- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1742 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001743
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001744- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1745 files.
1746
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001747Build
1748-----
1749
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001750- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001751 different root directory.
1752
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001753C API
1754-----
1755
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001756- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1757 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1758 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1759 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1760 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1761 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1762 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1763 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1764 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1765 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1766
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001767- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1768 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1769 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1770 from Python.
1771
1772
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001773New platforms
1774-------------
1775
1776None this time.
1777
1778Tests
1779-----
1780
1781- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1782 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1783
1784Windows
1785-------
1786
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001787- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1788
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001789- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1790 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1791 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1792 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1793 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1794 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1795 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1796 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1797 that's what it's for.
1798
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001799Mac
1800---
1801
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001802- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1803 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1804 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1805 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001806- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1807 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1808- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001809
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001810SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1811------------------------------------
1812
1813430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1814598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1815622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1816661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1817683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1818697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1819713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1820724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1821727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1822729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1823730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1824731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1825732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1826733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1827735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1828740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1829744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1830745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1831747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1832749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1833751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1834753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1835755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1836757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1837760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1838
1839
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001840What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1841================================
1842
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001843*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001844
1845Core and builtins
1846-----------------
1847
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001848- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1849 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1850
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001851- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1852 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1853 and cannot be strings).
1854
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001855- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1856 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1857 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1858 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1859
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001860- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1861 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1862 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1863 Python itself.
1864
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001865- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1866 the referenced object, if it has one.
1867
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001868- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1869 the thread started at
1870 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1871
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001872- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1873 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1874 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1875 placed on a list index.
1876
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001877- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1878 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1879 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1880 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1881
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001882- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1883 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1884 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1885 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1886 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1887 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1888 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1889
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001890- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1891 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1892 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1893 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1894 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1895
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001896- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1897 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001898
1899- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1900 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1901 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1902 #693195.)
1903
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001904- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1905 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001906
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001907- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001908 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001909 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1910 interpreter executions, would fail.
1911
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001912- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001913 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001914 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001915
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001916Extension modules
1917-----------------
1918
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001919- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1920 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1921 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1922 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1923
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001924- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1925 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1926
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001927- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1928 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1929 and Greg Chapman.)
1930
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001931- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1932 recursively.
1933
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001934- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001935 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1936 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1937 leaks.
1938
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001939- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1940
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001941- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1942 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1943 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1944 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1945 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1946 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1947 #705836.
1948
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001949- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001950 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1951
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001952- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1953 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1954 See SF bug #692416.
1955
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001956- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1957 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1958
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001959- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1960 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1961 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001962
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001963- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001964 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1965 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1966
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001967- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1968 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1969 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1970 timeouts to work properly.
1971
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001972Library
1973-------
1974
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001975- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1976 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1977 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1978 future release.
1979
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001980- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1981 for querying platform dependent features.
1982
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001983- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001984
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001985- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1986 pickle protocol versions.
1987
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001988- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1989 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1990 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1991
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001992- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1993
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001994- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1995 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1996 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1997 modules.
1998
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001999- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2000 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2001 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2002
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002003- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2004 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2005
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002006- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2007 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2008 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2009
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002010- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002011 MS Office extensions.
2012
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002013- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2014 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2015
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002016- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2017 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2018
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002019- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2020 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2021 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2022 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2023 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2024 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2025
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002026- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2027 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2028 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002029
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002030- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2031 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2032 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2033
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002034- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2035
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002036- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2037 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2038 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2039
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002040Tools/Demos
2041-----------
2042
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002043- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2044 See the module docstring for details.
2045
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002046Build
2047-----
2048
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002049- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2050 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002051
2052C API
2053-----
2054
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002055- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2056
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002057- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2058 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2059 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2060
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002061- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2062 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002063
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002064 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2065 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2066 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002067
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002068- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002069 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2070
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002071- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2072 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2073 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002074
2075New platforms
2076-------------
2077
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002078None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002079
2080Tests
2081-----
2082
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002083- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2084 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002085
2086Windows
2087-------
2088
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002089- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2090 function.
2091
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002092- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2093 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002094
2095Mac
2096---
2097
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002098- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2099 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002100
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002101- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2102 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002103
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002104- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2105 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2106 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002107
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002108- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002109 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2110 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002111
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002112- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2113 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002114
2115
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002116What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2117=================================
2118
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002119*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002120
2121Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002122-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002123
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002124- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2125 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2126 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2127
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002128- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2129 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2130 (SF patch #664376.)
2131
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002132- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2133 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2134 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2135 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2136 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2137 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002138 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002139
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002140- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2141 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2142 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2143 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002144 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002145
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002146- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2147 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2148 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2149 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2150 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2151 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2152 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2153 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2154 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2155 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2156 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2157
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002158- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2159 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2160 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2161 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2162 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2163 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2164
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002165- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2166 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2167
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002168- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2169 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2170 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2171 case.)
2172
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002173- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2174 passed as unicode strings.
2175
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002176- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2177 See SF bug #683467.
2178
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002179- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2180 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2181
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002182- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2183
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002184- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2185
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002186- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2187 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2188 arguments.
2189
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002190- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2191 See SF bug #667147.
2192
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002193- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002194 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002195 See SF bug #676155.
2196
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002197- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002198 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002199 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2200 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2201 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2202 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2203 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2204 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002205
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002206Extension modules
2207-----------------
2208
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002209- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2210 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2211 tp_as_number pointer.
2212
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002213- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2214 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2215 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2216 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2217 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2218
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002219- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2220
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002221- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2222
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002223- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002224 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002225 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2226 patch #678531.)
2227
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002228- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2229 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2230
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002231- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2232 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2233
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002234- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2235
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002236- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2237 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2238 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2239
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002240- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2241
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002242- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2243 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2244
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002245- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002246
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002247- datetime changes:
2248
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002249 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2250
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002251 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2252 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2253 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2254 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2255 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2256 now.
2257
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002258 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002259 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2260 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002261
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002262 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002263 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002264 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2265 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2266 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2267 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002268
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002269 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2270 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2271 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002272 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2273
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002274 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2275 by a later example coded by Guido.
2276
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002277 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002278 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2279 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2280 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002281 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2282 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2283
2284 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2285 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2286 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2287 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2288 tzinfo subclass instance.
2289
2290 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2291 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2292 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2293 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2294 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2295 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2296 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2297 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002298
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002299 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2300 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2301 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2302 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2303 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002304 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2305
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002306 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002307
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002308 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2309 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2310 as a naive datetime object.
2311
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002312 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2313 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2314 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2315
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002316 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2317 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2318 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2319 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2320 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2321 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2322 comparison.
2323
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002324 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2325 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2326 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2327 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002328 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002329
2330 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002331
2332 and ::
2333
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002334 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2335
2336 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2337 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2338 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2339 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2340
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002341 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2342 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2343 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2344 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2345 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2346
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002347 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2348 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002349 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2350 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002351
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002352Library
2353-------
2354
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002355- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2356 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2357
2358- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2359 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2360 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2361 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2362 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2363 See PEP 307 for details.
2364
2365- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2366 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2367
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002368- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2369 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002370 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002371 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2372 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002373 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002374
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002375- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2376 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2377
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002378- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2379 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2380 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2381
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002382- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2383
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002384- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2385 exception.
2386
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002387- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2388 class.
2389
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002390- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2391 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2392 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2393
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002394- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2395 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2396
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002397- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002398 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2399 See SF bug #659228.
2400
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002401- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2402 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2403 See SF patch #651082.
2404
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002405- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002406
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002407- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2408 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2409
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002410- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002411 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002412
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002413- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2414 DOS paths from other platforms.
2415
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002416Tools/Demos
2417-----------
2418
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002419- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2420 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2421 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2422 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2423 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2424 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2425 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2426 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2427 example:
2428
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002429 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2430 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002431
2432 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2433
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002434
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002435Build
2436-----
2437
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002438- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2439 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2440 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002441 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2442
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002443 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2444
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002445- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2446 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2447 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2448 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2449 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2450 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2451 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2452 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2453 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2454
2455- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2456 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2457 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2458 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2459
2460- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2461 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2462
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002463C API
2464-----
2465
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002466- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2467 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002468
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002469- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2470 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2471 tp_as_number pointer.
2472
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002473- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2474 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2475 (SF #681367)
2476
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002477- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2478 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2479 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2480 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002481
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002482Tests
2483-----
2484
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002485- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002486 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2487 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2488 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2489 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2490 pydoc.)
2491
2492- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2493
2494- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002495
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002496Windows
2497-------
2498
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002499- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2500 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2501 time).
2502
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002503- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2504 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2505
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002506- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2507 release without strong cryptography.
2508
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002509- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002510 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002511
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002512- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2513 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2514
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002515Mac
2516---
2517
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002518- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2519 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002520
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002521- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2522 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2523 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002524
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002525- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2526 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002527
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002528- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2529 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2530 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2531 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002532
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002533- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002534 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2535 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2536 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002537
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002538
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002539What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002540=================================
2541
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002542*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002543
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002544Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002545--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002546
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002547- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2548
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002549- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2550 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002551 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002552 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002553 a different meaning than before.
2554
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002555- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002556 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002557 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002558
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002559- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002560 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002561 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002562
2563- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2564 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2565 and deallocation.
2566
2567- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2568 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2569
2570- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2571 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2572 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2573 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2574 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2575
2576- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2577 now detected by the garbage collector.
2578
2579- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2580 [SF bug 519621]
2581
2582- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2583 identifier.
2584
2585- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2586 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2587 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2588 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2589 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2590 [SF bug 563060]
2591
2592- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2593 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2594 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2595 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2596 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2597
2598- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2599 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2600 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2601
2602- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2603
2604- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2605 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2606 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2607 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2608 state of the slots would be lost.)
2609
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002610Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002611-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002612
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002613- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002614 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2615 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2616 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2617 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002618 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2619 Jython 2.1.
2620
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002621- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002622 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002623 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2624 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2625 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2626 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2627 these, see PEP 302.
2628
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002629- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2630 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2631 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2632
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002633- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2634 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2635 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2636
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002637- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2638 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2639 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2640
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002641- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2642 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2643 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2644 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2645 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2646 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2647 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2648 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2649 releases or implementations.
2650
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002651- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002652 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2653 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002654
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002655- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2656 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2657
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002658- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2659 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2660 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2661
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002662- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2663 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2664
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002665- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2666 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002667 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2668 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002669
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002670- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2671 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2672 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2673 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2674 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2675
2676 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2677 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2678 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2679 pattern.
2680
2681 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2682 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2683 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2684 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2685
2686 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2687 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2688 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2689 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2690 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2691 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2692
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002693- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2694 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2695 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2696 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2697 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2698 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2699 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2700 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002701
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002702- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2703 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2704 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2705 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2706 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002707 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2708 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2709 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2710 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2711 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2712 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2713 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002714
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002715- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2716 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2717
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002718- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2719 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2720 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2721 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2722 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2723 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2724 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2725 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2726 to Zack Weinberg!
2727
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002728- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2729 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2730 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2731 type. This has been fixed now.
2732
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002733- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2734 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2735 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2736
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002737- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2738 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2739 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2740 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2741 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2742 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2743 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2744 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002745 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002746
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002747- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2748 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2749 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002750
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002751- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2752 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2753 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2754 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2755 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2756 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2757 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2758 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002759 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002760 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2761 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2762
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002763- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2764 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2765 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2766 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2767 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2768 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2769 this.)
2770
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002771- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2772 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002773 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002774 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002775 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2776 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002777 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2778 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002779
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002780- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2781 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2782 currently running.
2783
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002784- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2785 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2786 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2787 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2788
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002789- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2790 as directory names.
2791
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002792- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2793 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2794
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002795- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2796 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2797
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002798- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002799 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2800 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002801
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002802- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2803 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2804 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2805 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2806 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2807
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002808- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2809 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2810 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2811 removed.
2812
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002813- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2814 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2815 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2816
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002817- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2818 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2819 to __debug__.
2820
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002821- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2822 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2823 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2824
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002825- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2826 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2827 deprecated now.
2828
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002829- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2830 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2831 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002832
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002833- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2834 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2835 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2836 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2837 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002838
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002839- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2840 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2841
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002842- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2843 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2844 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002845 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002846 is backward compatible.
2847
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002848- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2849 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2850 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2851 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2852 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2853
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002854- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2855 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2856 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2857 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2858 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2859 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002860
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002861- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2862 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2863
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002864- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2865 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2866
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002867- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2868 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2869 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2870 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2871 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2872
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002873- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2874 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2875 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2876
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002877- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002878 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2879
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002880- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2881 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2882 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002883
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002884- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2885 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2886
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002887- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2888 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2889 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2890
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002891- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2892
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002893Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002894-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002895
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002896- Added three operators to the operator module:
2897 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2898 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2899 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2900
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002901- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2902
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002903- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2904 archives.
2905
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002906- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2907 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2908 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2909
2910 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2911
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002912- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2913 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2914 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002915 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002916
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002917- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2918 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2919 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2920 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002921 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2922 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2923 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2924 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002925
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002926- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2927 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002928
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002929- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2930
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002931- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2932 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2933
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002934- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2935 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2936 supported.
2937
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002938- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2939
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002940- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2941 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002942
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002943- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2944 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2945
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002946- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2947
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002948- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2949 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2950
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002951- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2952 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2953 functions but callable type objects.
2954
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002955- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002956 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002957 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002958
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002959- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2960 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002961
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002962- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2963 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002964
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002965- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2966 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2967 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2968 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2969
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002970- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2971 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002972
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002973- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2974 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2975 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2976 and __imul__.
2977
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002978- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002979 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2980 is called.
2981
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002982- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2983 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2984 interpreter was compiled.
2985
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002986- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2987 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2988 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002989 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002990 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2991 1, not 2.
2992
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002993- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2994 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2995 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2996 limit.
2997
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002998- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2999 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3000 bug #623464.
3001
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003002- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3003 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3004 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3005 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3006
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003007Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003008-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003009
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003010- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3011
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003012- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3013 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3014 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3015 with Python 2.3a2.
3016
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003017- os.path exposes getctime.
3018
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003019- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003020 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003021 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003022 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003023 unit tests of floating point results.
3024
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003025- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3026 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3027 has been increased.
3028
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003029- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3030 executed.
3031
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003032- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3033 postinstallation script.
3034
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003035- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3036 test the current module.
3037
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003038- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003039 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3040 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3041 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3042 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3043
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003044- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003045 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003046 Ward's Optik package.
3047
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003048- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3049 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3050 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3051 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3052
3053- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3054 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003055 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003056
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003057- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3058 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3059 shelf are binary pickles.
3060
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003061- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3062 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3063
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003064- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3065 modules are iterators now.
3066
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003067- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3068 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3069 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3070 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3071 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3072 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003073
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003074- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3075 with their entity value.
3076
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003077- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3078
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003079- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3080 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003081
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003082- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3083 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003084 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003085
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003086- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3087 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3088 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3089 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3090 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3091 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3092 main():
3093
3094 import locale
3095 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3096
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003097- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3098 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3099
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003100- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3101 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3102 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3103 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3104 to the new standard.
3105
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003106- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3107 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3108 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3109 an extension to the database.
3110
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003111- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3112 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3113 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3114 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003115 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003116
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003117- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003118 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003119
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003120- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3121 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3122 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3123 bounded integers.
3124
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003125- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3126 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3127 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3128 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3129 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3130 in existence.
3131
3132 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3133 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3134 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3135 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3136 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3137 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3138
3139 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3140 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3141 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3142 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3143
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003144- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3145 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3146 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3147
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003148- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3149
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003150- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3151 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3152 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3153 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3154
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003155- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3156 argument.
3157
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003158- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3159 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3160 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3161 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3162 [SF patch 560794].
3163
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003164- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3165 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3166 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003167 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3168 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3169 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003170
3171- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3172 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003173
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003174- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3175 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3176 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3177 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003178
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003179- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3180 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3181 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3182 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3183 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3184
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003185- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003186
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003187- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3188
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003189- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3190 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3191 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3192 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3193 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3194 identical to None.
3195
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003196- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3197 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3198 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3199 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3200 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3201 results now.
3202
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003203- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3204 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3205
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003206- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3207 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3208 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3209 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3210 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3211 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3212 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3213 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3214
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003215- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3216
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003217- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3218 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3219
3220- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3221 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3222 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3223 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3224 and other systems.
3225
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003226- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3227 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3228 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3229 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 +00003230 work well with these.
3231
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003232- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3233
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003234- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003235 connections.
3236
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003237- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3238 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3239 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3240
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003241- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3242 sets
3243
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003244- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3245 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3246 name.
3247
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003248- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3249 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3250 passed in.
3251
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003252- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003253 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003254 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3255 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003256
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003257- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3258
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003259- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3260
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003261- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3262 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3263 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3264
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003265- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3266 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3267 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3268 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003269 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003270
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003271- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003272 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003273 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003274
3275- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3276 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3277 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3278
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003279- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003280 the value of its expression argument.
3281
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003282- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3283 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3284 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3285
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003286- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3287 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3288 skipstone browser was included.
3289
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003290- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3291 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3292
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003293Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003294-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003295
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003296- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3297 names in addition to accepting file names.
3298
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003299- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3300 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3301 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3302 still used and useful.)
3303
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003304- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3305 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3306 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3307 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003308
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003309- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3310 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3311 the generated binary.
3312
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003313Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003314-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003315
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003316- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3317
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003318- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3319 except in the hands of experts.
3320
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003321- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003322 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3323 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3324 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003325
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003326- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3327 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3328 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3329 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3330 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3331 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3332 builds.
3333
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003334- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3335 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3336 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3337 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3338 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3339 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3340 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3341 new type.
3342
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003343- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003344
3345 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3346 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3347 positive infinities.
3348
3349 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3350 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3351 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3352 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3353 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3354 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3355 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3356
3357 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3358
3359 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3360
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003361- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3362 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3363 size of the executable.
3364
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003365- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3366 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3367 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3368 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003369
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003370- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3371
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003372- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3373 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3374 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003375
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003376- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3377 well as Unix.
3378
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003379- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3380 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3381 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3382 modules in the README file for details.
3383
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003384C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003385-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003386
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003387- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3388 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003389 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003390 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003391 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003392
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003393- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3394 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3395 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3396 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3397 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3398 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003399 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003400 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3401 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3402 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3403 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3404 aligned.)
3405
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003406- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3407 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3408 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3409
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003410- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3411 level.
3412
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003413- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3414 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3415 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3416 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3417 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3418
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003419- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3420 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3421 code.
3422
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003423- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3424 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3425 adjusting for negative indices.
3426
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003427- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3428 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3429 object.
3430
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003431- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3432 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3433 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3434
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003435- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3436 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003437
3438- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3439
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003440- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3441 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3442 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3443 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3444
3445- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3446
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003447- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003448
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003449- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003450 without going through the buffer API.
3451
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003452- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003453
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003454- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3455 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3456 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3457 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3458
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003459- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3460 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3461
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003462- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003463 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3464
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003465New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003466-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003467
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003468- OpenVMS is now supported.
3469
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003470- AtheOS is now supported.
3471
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003472- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3473
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003474- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3475
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003476Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003477-----
3478
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003479- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3480 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3481 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003482
3483Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003484-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003485
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003486- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3487 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3488 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3489 bugs.
3490 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003491 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003492 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3493 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003494 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003495
3496- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003497 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003498
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003499- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3500 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3501
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003502- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3503 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003504 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003505 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3506
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003507- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3508 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3509 use files" uninstall option).
3510
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003511- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3512
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003513- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3514 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3515
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003516- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3517 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3518 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3519
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003520- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3521 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3522 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3523 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3524 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003525 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3526 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3527 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003528
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003529- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003530 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003531 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3532 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3533 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3534 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3535 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3536 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3537 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3538 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3539 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3540 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3541 work around.
3542
3543- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3544 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3545 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3546 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3547 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3548 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3549 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3550 specified with O_CREAT too).
3551
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003552Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003553----
3554
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003555- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003556
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003557- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3558 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3559 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3560
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003561- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3562 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3563 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3564
3565- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3566 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3567 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3568 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3569 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3570 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3571 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3572 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003573
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003574- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3575 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3576 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003577
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003578- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3579 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3580 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3581 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3582 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003583
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003584- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3585 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3586 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003587
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003588- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3589 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003590
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003591- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3592 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3593 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3594 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3595 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003596
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003597- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3598 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3599 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3600
3601- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3602 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3603 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003604
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003605- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3606 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3607 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3608 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003609 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003610
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003611- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3612 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003613
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003614- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3615 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003616
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003617- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003618 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003619 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3620 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003621
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003622
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003623What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003624===============================
3625
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003626*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3627
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003628Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003629--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003630
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003631- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3632 with a custom metaclass.
3633
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003634Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003635-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003636
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003637- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3638 are proxies.
3639
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003640Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003641-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003642
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003643- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3644 very short strings.
3645
3646- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3647 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3648 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3649 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3650 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3651
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003652Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003653-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003654
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003655- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3656 close or delete time).
3657
3658- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3659 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3660
3661- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3662
3663- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003664 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003665
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003666Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003667-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003668
3669Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003670-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003671
3672C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003673-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003674
3675New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003676-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003677
3678Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003679-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003680
3681Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003682-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003683
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003684- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3685
3686- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3687 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3688
3689- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3690 deleted at process exit time.
3691
3692- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3693 in backslash.
3694
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003695Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003696----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003697
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003698- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3699 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3700 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3701
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003702
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003703What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003704===========================
3705
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003706*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3707
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003708Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003709--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003710
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003711- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3712 been extensively updated. See
3713
3714 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3715
3716 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3717
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003718- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3719 deleted!
3720
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003721- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3722 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3723 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3724 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3725 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3726
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003727- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3728
3729 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3730 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3731
3732 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3733 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3734 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3735 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3736 supported anyway.
3737
3738 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3739 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3740
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003741- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3742 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3743 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3744 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3745 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003746
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003747- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3748 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3749 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3750
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003751Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003752-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003753
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003754- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3755 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3756 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3757 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3758 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3759 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003760 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3761 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3762 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3763 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003764
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003765- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3766 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3767 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3768
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003769Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003770-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003771
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003772- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3773
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003774Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003775-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003776
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003777- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3778 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3779 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3780 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3781 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3782 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3783
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003784- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3785
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003786- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3787
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003788- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3789
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003790- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3791 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3792 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3793
3794- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3795
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003796Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003797-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003798
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003799- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3800 off a search on Google.
3801
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003802Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003803-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003804
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003805- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3806 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3807 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3808 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3809 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3810 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3811 other platforms should do likewise.
3812
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003813- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3814 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3815 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3816
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003817C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003818-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003819
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003820- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3821 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3822 producing key-value pairs.
3823
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003824- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003825 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003826 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3827 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3828 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3829 previously went unchallenged.
3830
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003831New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003832-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003833
3834Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003835-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003836
3837Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003838-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003839
3840Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003841----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003842
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003843- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3844 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003845
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003846- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3847 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3848 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3849 home.
3850
3851
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003852What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003853===========================
3854
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003855*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3856
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003857Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003858--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003859
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003860- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3861 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003862
3863 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003864 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003865
3866 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3867 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003868 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003869 This needs to be documented.
3870
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003871- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3872 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3873
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003874- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3875 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3876 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3877
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003878- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3879 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3880
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003881- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3882 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3883 class forbids it).
3884
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003885- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3886 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3887 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3888
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003889- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3890
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003891Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003892-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003893
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003894- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3895 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003896 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003897
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003898- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3899 (like 1 + '').
3900
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003901Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003902-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003903
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003904- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3905 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3906 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3907 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003908 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003909 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3910
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003911- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3912 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3913 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3914 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3915
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003916- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3917 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003918 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3919 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3920 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003921
3922- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3923 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003924
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003925- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3926 bytes on its input.
3927
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003928Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003929-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003930
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003931- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003932 convenience function.
3933
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003934- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3935 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3936 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003937 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3938 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3939 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3940 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3941 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3942 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003943
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003944- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3945 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3946 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3947 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3948
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003949- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3950 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3951 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3952
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003953- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3954 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3955 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3956 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3957
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003958- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3959 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003960 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003961 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3962 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3963 new -l and -e options.
3964
3965- statcache is now deprecated.
3966
3967- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3968 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003969 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003970 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3971 time properly taken into account.
3972
3973- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3974 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3975 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3976 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3977
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003978Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003979-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003980
3981Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003982-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003983
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003984- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3985 is built with libdb3 if available.
3986
3987- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3988
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003989C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003990-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003991
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003992- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3993 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3994 PySequence_Size().
3995
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003996- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3997
3998- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3999 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4000 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4001
4002- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4003 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4004
4005- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4006 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4007
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004008New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004009-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004010
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004011- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4012 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4013
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004014- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4015 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4016
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004017- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4018
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004019Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004020-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004021
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004022- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4023 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4024
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004025Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004026-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004027
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004028Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004029----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004030
4031- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4032 removed completely in the next release.
4033
4034- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4035 OSX.
4036
4037- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4038 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4039
4040- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4041
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004042
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004043What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004044===========================
4045
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004046*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4047
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004048Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004049--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004050
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004051- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004052 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004053 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004054 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4055 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004056 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4057 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004058 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4059 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004060
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004061- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4062 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4063
4064- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4065 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4066
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004067Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004068-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004069
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004070- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4071 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4072 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4073 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4074 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4075 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4076 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4077 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4078
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004079- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4080 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4081 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4082 example).
4083
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004084- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004085 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004086 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004087 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004088
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004089- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4090 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4091 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004092 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004093
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004094- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4095 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4096 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4097 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4098 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4099 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4100
4101 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4102
4103 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4104
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004105Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004106-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004107
4108- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4109
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004110- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4111
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004112- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4113 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004114
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004115- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4116 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4117 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4118 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4119 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4120 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004121 attributes.
4122
4123- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4124 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4125 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004126
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004127- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4128 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4129 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004130
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004131- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4132 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4133 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004134 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4135 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4136
4137- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4138 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004139
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004140Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004141-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004142
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004143- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4144 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4145
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004146- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4147 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4148 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4149 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4150
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004151- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4152 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4153 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4154 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4155
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004156 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4157 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4158 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4159 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4160 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4161 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4162 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4163 without losing information).
4164
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004165- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004166 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4167 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4168 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4169 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4170 module).
4171
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004172 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004173 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4174 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4175 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4176 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004177
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004178- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004179 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4180 encoding.
4181
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004182- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4183 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4184
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004185- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004186 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4187
4188- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4189 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4190 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4191 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4192
4193- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4194
4195- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4196 ON, and OFF.
4197
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004198- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4199 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4200
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004201Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004202-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004203
4204- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4205 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4206 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004207
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004208- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4209 been added: -X and -E.
4210
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004211Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004212-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004213
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004214- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4215 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4216
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004217C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004218-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004219
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004220- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4221 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4222 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4223 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4224 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4225
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004226- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4227 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4228 as long) arguments.
4229
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004230- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4231 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4232 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4233 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4234 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4235 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4236
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004237- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4238 input.
4239
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004240New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004241-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004242
4243Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004244-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004245
4246Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004247-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004248
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004249- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4250 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4251 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4252
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004253- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4254 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4255 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004256 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004257
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004258 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4259 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4260 import signal
4261 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004262
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004263 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004264 while 1:
4265 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004266 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004267 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4268 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4269 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4270 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004271
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004272
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004273What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4274===========================
4275
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004276*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4277
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004278Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004280
4281- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4282 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4283 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4284
4285- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4286 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4287 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4288 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4289 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4290 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4291 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004292
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004293- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004294 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004295 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4296 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4297 associate a docstring with a property.
4298
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004299- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4300 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4301 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4302 other built-in object types.
4303
4304- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4305 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4306 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4307 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4308 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4309
4310- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4311 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4312
4313- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4314 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004315 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004316 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4317 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4318 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4319 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4320 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4321
4322- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4323 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4324 class.
4325
4326- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4327 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4328 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4329 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4330
4331- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4332 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4333 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4334 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4335
4336- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4337 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4338
4339- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4340 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4341 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4342 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4343 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004344 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004345 with the same value as s.
4346
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004347- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4348
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004349Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004350----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004351
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004352- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4353
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004354- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4355 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4356 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4357 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4358 objects.
4359
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004360- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4361 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004362 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4363 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4364
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004365- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4366 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4367 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4368
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004369Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004370-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004371
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004372- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4373 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4374 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4375 by the instances.
4376
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004377- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4378 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4379 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4380
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004381- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4382 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4383 before the entire comparison is complete.
4384
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004385- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4386 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4387 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4388
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004389- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4390 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4391 getwriter().
4392
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004393- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4394 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4395
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004396- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004397 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4398 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4399
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004400- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4401 iterable object.
4402
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004403- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4404 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004405
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004406- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4407 authentication.
4408
4409- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4410 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004411
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004412- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004413 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4414 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4415 a sample driver.)
4416
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004417Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004418-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004419
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004420- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4421 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4422 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4423 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4424 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4425 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4426 kernel has large file support.
4427
4428- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4429 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4430 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4431 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4432 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4433
4434- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4435 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4436 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4437
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004438C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004440
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004441- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4442 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4443
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004444New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004445-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004446
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004447- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4448 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4449
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004450Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004451-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004452
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004453- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4454 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4455 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4456 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4457 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4458
4459- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4460 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4461 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4462 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4463
4464- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4465 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4466
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004467Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004468-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004469
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004470- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004471 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4472 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004473
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004474
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004475What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4476===========================
4477
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004478*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4479
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004480Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004481----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004482
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004483- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4484 big to represent as a C double.
4485
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004486- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4487 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4488 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4489 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4490 restriction).
4491
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004492- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4493 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4494 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4495 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4496 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4497
4498 >>> dir([])
4499 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4500 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4501 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4502 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4503 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4504 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4505 'reverse', 'sort']
4506
4507 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4508
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004509- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004510 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4511 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4512 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4513 OverflowError exception.
4514
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004515- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004516 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004517 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4518 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4519 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4520 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4521 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004522 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004523 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4524 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4525
4526 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4527 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4528 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4529 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004530
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004531- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004532 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4533 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4534 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4535 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4536 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4537 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4538 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4539 once it is created.
4540
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004541- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4542 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4543 (key, value) pairs.
4544
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004545- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004546 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4547 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4548
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004549- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4550 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4551 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4552 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4553 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004554
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004555- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004556 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4557 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4558
4559 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4560
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004561- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004562 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4563
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004564Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004565-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004566
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004567- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004568 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4569 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004570
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004571- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4572 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4573 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4574 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4575 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4576 in this area anymore).
4577
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004578- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4579 threading.Timer.
4580
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004581- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4582 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4583
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004584- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004585 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4586
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004587- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004588 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4589 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4590 converted to Python longs.
4591
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004592- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004593 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4594
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004595- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4596 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4597 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4598
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004599Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004600-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004601
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004602- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4603 division operators as per PEP 238.
4604
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004605Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004606-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004607
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004608- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4609 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4610 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4611 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4612
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004613C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004614-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004615
4616- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004617
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004618- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4619 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004620 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004621
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004622 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4623 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004624 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004625 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004626
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004627- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004628 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4629 module:
4630
4631 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004632
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004633 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4634 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004635
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004636 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4637 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004638
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004639 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4640
4641 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4642
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004643- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004644 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4645 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4646 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004647
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004648New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004649-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004650
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004651- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4652 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4653 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4654 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4655 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004656
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004657Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004658-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004659
4660Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004661-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004662
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004663- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4664 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4665 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4666 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004667 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4668 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4669 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4670 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4671 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004672
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004673- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004674 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4675
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004676
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004677What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4678===========================
4679
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004680*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4681
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004682Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004683-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004684
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004685- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4686 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4687
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004688- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4689 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4690 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004691
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004692- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4693 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4694 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4695 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004696
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004697- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4698
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004699- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004700
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004701Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004702-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004703
4704- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004705 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004706 the module docstring for details.
4707
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004708Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004709-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004710
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004711- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004712 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4713 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4714 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004715
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004716- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4717 Nick Mathewson.
4718
4719Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004720----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004721
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004722- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4723 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4724 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4725 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4726 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4727 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4728 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4729 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4730
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004731- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4732 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4733 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4734 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4735
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004736- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4737 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4738 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4739 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4740 come a long way).
4741
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004742- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4743 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4744 write filters for these warnings).
4745
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004746- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4747 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4748 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4749 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4750 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4751
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004752- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4753 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4754 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4755 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4756 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4757 older distribution.
4758
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004759Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004760-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004761
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004762- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4763 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004764 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004765
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004766- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4767 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4768 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4769
4770- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4771
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004772- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4773
4774- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4775
4776- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4777
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004778- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004779
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004780- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4781
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004782New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004783-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004784
4785C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004786-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004787
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004788- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4789 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4790 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4791 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4792 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4793 against buffer overruns.
4794
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004795- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004796 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4797 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004798 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4799 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4800 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4801
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004802- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4803 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4804 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4805 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4806 deprecated.
4807
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004808Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004809-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004810
4811- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4812 relevant is found.
4813
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004814
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004815What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004816===========================
4817
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004818*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4819
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004820Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004821----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004822
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004823- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4824 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4825 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4826 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4827 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4828 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4829 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4830 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004831 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004832 repaired.
4833
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004834- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004835 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004836 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4837 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4838 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4839 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4840 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4841 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4842 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4843 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4844
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004845- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4846 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4847 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4848 leading BMO character).
4849
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004850- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4851 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4852 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4853
4854 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4855 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4856 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004857
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004858 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4859 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4860 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4861 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4862 for various simple to use conversions.
4863
4864 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4865 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4866
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004867 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4868 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4869 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4870 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4871 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4872 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4873 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4874 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4875 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4876 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4877 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4878 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4879 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4880 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4881 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004882
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004883- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4884 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4885 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004886 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004887 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004888
4889 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004890 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4891 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4892 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4893 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4894 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004895 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4896 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004897
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004898 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4899 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4900 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004901 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004902
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004903- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4904 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4905 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4906 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4907 floating arithmetic,
4908
4909 x = 9007199254740992.0
4910 print long(x)
4911
4912 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4913 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4914 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4915 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4916 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4917 functions are of good quality).
4918
4919 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4920 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4921 algorithms to break.
4922
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004923- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4924 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4925 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4926 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4927 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4928 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4929 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4930 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4931 order.
4932
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004933- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4934 operation along the most common code paths.
4935
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004936- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4937 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4938
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004939- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4940 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4941 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4942 {}.update(UserDict())
4943
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004944- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4945 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4946 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4947 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4948 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4949 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4950 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4951 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4952
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004953- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004954 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004955
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004956 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004957 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4958 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004959 join() method of strings
4960 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004961 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4962 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004963 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004964 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004965
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004966- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4967 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4968
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004969- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4970 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4971
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004972- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4973 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4974 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4975 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4976
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004977- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4978 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004979 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004980 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4981 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004982
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004983- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4984
4985
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004986Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004987-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004988
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004989- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004990 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004991 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4992 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4993
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004994- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4995 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4996
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004997- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4998 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4999 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5000 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5001
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005002- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5003 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5004 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5005
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005006- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5007
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005008- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5009
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005010- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5011 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5012 that are still imported into string.py).
5013
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005014- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5015
5016- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5017 Now it does.
5018
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005019- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5020
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005021- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5022 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5023 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5024 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5025 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005026 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5027 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005028
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005029- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5030 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5031 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5032 'help(object)'.
5033
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005034Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005035-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005036
5037- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005038 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005039 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5040 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5041
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005042- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005043 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5044 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005045
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005046C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005047-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005048
5049- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5050 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005051
5052----
5053
5054**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**