blob: b55da3ef4bd185e8d7bbbc4d763845a32cc98a88 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
7What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1|beta 3)
8=====================================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +000015- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
16 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
17 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
18
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000019
20Extension Modules
21-----------------
22
23...
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +000024
25Library
26-------
27
28- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
29 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
30 raised is re-raised.
31
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +000032- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
33 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
34
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +000035- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
36 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
37 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
38 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
39 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
40 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
41 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
42 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
43 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
44 by the slice are recomputed now.
45
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +000046- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +000047
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000048Build
49-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +000050
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +000051- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
52 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
53 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000054
55C API
56-----
57
58...
59
60Documentation
61-------------
62
63...
64
65Tests
66-----
67
68...
69
70Windows
71-------
72
73...
74
75Mac
76---
77
78...
79
80New platforms
81-------------
82
83...
84
85Tools/Demos
86-----------
87
88...
89
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +000090
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000091What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
92================================
93
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +000094*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000095
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +000096License
97-------
98
99The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
100is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
101changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
102Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
103intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
104durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
105the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
106License::
107
108 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
109
110says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
111to Python 2.1.1.
112
113The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
114License Version 2.
115
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000116Core and builtins
117-----------------
118
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000119- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
120 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
121 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
122 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
123 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
124 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
125 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
126 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
127 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
128 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
129
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000130- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000131
132Extension Modules
133-----------------
134
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000135- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
136 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
137 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
138 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000139
140Library
141-------
142
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000143- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
144 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
145 returned.
146
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000147- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
148
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000149- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
150 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
151
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000152- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
153
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000154- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
155 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000156
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000157- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
158
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000159- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
160
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000161- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000162 the source code is updated and reloaded.
163
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000164Build
165-----
166
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000167- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000168
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000169What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
170================================
171
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000172*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000173
174Core and builtins
175-----------------
176
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000177- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000178 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
179
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000180- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
181 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
182 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
183 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
184
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000185- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
186 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
187
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000188- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
189 constant.
190
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000191- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
192 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
193 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
194 large), and to anomalies such as
195 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
196 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
197 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
198 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000199
200Extension modules
201-----------------
202
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000203- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
204 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000205 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
206 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
207 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000208
209Library
210-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000211
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000212- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000213 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000214 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
215 --swig-cpp.
216
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000217- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
218 it is set.
219
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000220- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000221
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000222- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
223 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
224 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
225 Closes bug #1039270.
226
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000227- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000228
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000229 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000230 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
231 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
232 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
233 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
234 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
235 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
236 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
237 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
238 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
239 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
240 + Updates to documentation.
241
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000242- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
243 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
244 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
245 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
246
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000247- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000248
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000249- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
250 applications should use the getmember function.
251
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000252- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
253
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000254- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
255 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
256 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
257 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
258 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
259 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
260 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
261 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
262 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
263
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000264- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
265 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000266 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000267
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000268- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
269 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
270 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
271 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
272 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
273 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
274 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
275 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000276
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000277- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
278 the new public features (of which there are many).
279
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000280- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000281 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
282 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
283 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
284 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000285 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000286
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000287- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
288
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000289- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
290 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
291 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
292 options.
293
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000294- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
295 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
296 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
297 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
298 conditions under which non-string values work.
299
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000300Build
301-----
302
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000303- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
304 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
305 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
306
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000307- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
308 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
309 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
310 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
311 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000312
313C API
314-----
315
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000316- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
317 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
318
319- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
320
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000321- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
322 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
323 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
324 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
325 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
326 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
327 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
328 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
329 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
330
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000331- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
332
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000333- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
334 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
335 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000336
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000337Tests
338-----
339
340- test__locale ported to unittest
341
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000342Mac
343---
344
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000345- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
346 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
347 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000348
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000349Tools/Demos
350-----------
351
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000352- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
353 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
354 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
355 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
356 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000357
358
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000359What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
360=================================
361
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000362*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000363
364Core and builtins
365-----------------
366
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000367- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000368 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
369
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000370- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
371 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
372 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
373 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
374 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
375 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
376 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
377 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000378 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
379 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
380 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
381 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
382 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000383
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000384- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
385 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
386 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
387 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
388 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
389
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000390- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
391
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000392- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
393 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
394
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000395- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
396 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
397 modified the list.
398
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000399- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
400 functions is now writable.
401
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000402- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
403 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
404 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
405 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
406
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000407- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
408 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
409 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
410 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
411 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000412
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000413- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
414 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
415
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000416Extension modules
417-----------------
418
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000419- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
420
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000421- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
422 data.
423
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000424- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
425 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
426 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
427 supposed to have been truncated away.
428
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000429- Added socket.socketpair().
430
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000431- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
432 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
433
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000434- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000435 versions of Python, have now been removed.
436
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000437Library
438-------
439
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000440- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000441 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000442
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000443- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
444 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
445
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000446- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
447 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
448
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000449- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
450
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000451- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
452 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000453
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000454- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
455 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
456
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000457- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
458
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000459- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
460
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000461- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
462
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000463- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
464 Percivall.
465
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000466- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
467 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
468
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000469- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
470 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
471 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000472 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000473
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000474- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
475 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
476 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
477 and exponent.
478
479- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
480
481- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
482 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
483 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
484
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000485- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
486 to the readline module.
487
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000488- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000489 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
490 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000491
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000492- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
493 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
494 contains symlinks.
495
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000496- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
497 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
498
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000499- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
500 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
501 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
502
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000503- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
504 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
505 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
506 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
507 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
508 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
509 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
510 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
511 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
512 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
513 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
514 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
515 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
516
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000517- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
518
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000519Tools/Demos
520-----------
521
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000522- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
523 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
524
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000525- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
526
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000527Build
528-----
529
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000530- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
531 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
532 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
533 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
534 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
535 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
536 plans to do so.
537
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000538- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
539 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
540
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000541- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
542 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
543
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000544- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
545 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
546
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000547- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
548 GNU/k*BSD systems.
549
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000550- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
551 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
552
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000553C API
554-----
555
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000556..
557
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000558Documentation
559-------------
560
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000561- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
562 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
563
564- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
565 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
566 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000567
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000568New platforms
569-------------
570
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000571- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
572
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000573Tests
574-----
575
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000576..
577
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000578Windows
579-------
580
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000581- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
582 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
583 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
584 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
585 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
586 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
587 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
588 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
589 the problem.
590
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000591Mac
592---
593
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000594..
595
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000596
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000597What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
598=================================
599
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000600*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000601
602Core and builtins
603-----------------
604
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000605- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
606 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
607 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
608 sensitive code.
609
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000610- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000611 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000612
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000613 @staticmethod
614 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000615
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000616 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000617
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000618- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
619 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
620 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
621 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
622 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
623 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
624 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
625 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
626 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
627 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
628 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
629
630 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
631 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
632 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
633 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
634 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
635 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
636 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
637
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000638- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
639 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
640
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000641- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000642 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000643
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000644- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000645 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000646 which was missing for no apparent reason.
647
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000648- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000649 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
650 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
651
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000652- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
653 types that support garbage collection.
654
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000655- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
656
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000657- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
658 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
659 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
660 Jython.
661
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000662- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
663
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000664- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
665 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
666
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000667- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
668 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
669 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000670
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000671- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
672 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
673 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
674
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000675Extension modules
676-----------------
677
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000678- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
679
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000680Library
681-------
682
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000683- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
684 TIS-620
685
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000686- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
687 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
688 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
689 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
690 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
691 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
692 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
693 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
694 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
695 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
696
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000697- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
698
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000699- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
700 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
701 same as when the argument is omitted).
702 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
703
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000704- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
705
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000706- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
707 schemes are offered.
708
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000709- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
710
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000711- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
712 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
713 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
714
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000715- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
716
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000717- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
718 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
719
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000720- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
721 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
722 when dummy_threading is being used.
723
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000724- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
725 from a tarfile.
726
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000727- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000728 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000729
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000730- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
731 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
732 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
733 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
734
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000735- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
736 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
737
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000738- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
739 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
740 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
741 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
742 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
743 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
744 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
745 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
746 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
747 by some other method in progress).
748
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000749- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
750 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
751 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000752
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000753- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
754
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000755- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
756 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
757 AM Kuchling.
758
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000759- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
760 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
761 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
762
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000763- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
764 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
765 instead of unsigned.
766
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000767- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000768 no longer part of the public API.
769
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000770- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
771 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
772 string methods of the same name).
773
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000774- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000775 SF patch 945642.
776
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000777- doctest unittest integration improvements:
778
779 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
780
781 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
782 DocTestSuites.
783
784- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
785 that provide thread-local data.
786
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000787- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
788 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
789
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000790- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
791
792- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
793 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
794 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
795
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000796- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
797
798 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
799 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
800 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000801
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000802 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
803 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
804 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
805 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
806
807 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
808 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
809
810 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
811 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
812 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
813 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
814
815 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
816 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
817 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
818 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
819 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
820
821 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
822 wrapping help output.
823
824 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
825 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
826 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000827
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000828C API
829-----
830
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000831- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
832 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
833 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
834 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
835 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
836 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
837 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
838 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
839 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
840 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
841 its visible semantics have not changed.
842
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000843- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
844 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
845
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000846Documentation
847-------------
848
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000849- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000850
851 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000852 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000853
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000854 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000855
856 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
857
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000858- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000859
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000860Tests
861-----
862
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000863- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000864 platforms that use the Makefile.
865
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000866- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
867 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
868 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
869
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000870
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000871What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
872=================================
873
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000874*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000875
876Core and builtins
877-----------------
878
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000879- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
880 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
881 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
882 objects now (one object instead of three).
883
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000884- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
885 Windows DLLs.
886
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000887- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
888 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000889
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000890- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
891 a new .pyc magic.
892
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000893- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
894 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
895 be there.
896
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000897- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
898 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
899 the LC_NUMERIC category.
900
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000901- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
902 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
903 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
904
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000905- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
906
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000907- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
908 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
909 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000910
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000911- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
912 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
913
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000914- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
915
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000916- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000917 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000918
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000919- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
920
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000921- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
922
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000923- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
924 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
925
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000926- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
927 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
928 Fixes bug #858016 .
929
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000930- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
931 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
932 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
933
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000934- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
935 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
936 improves their performance (about 35%).
937
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000938- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
939 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
940 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
941
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000942- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
943 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
944 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
945 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
946
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000947- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
948 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
949 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
950 length is not known).
951
952- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
953 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000954 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
955 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000956 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
957
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000958- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
959 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
960
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000961- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
962 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
963 keyword arguments.
964
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000965- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
966 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
967 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
968
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000969- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
970 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
971 cases.
972
973- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
974 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
975 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
976 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
977 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
978 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
979 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
980 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
981 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
982 a release build.
983
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000984- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
985 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
986
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000987- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000988 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000989
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000990- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
991 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
992 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
993 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
994 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
995 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
996 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
997 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
998 destroyed.
999
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001000- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1001 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1002 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1003 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1004 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1005 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1006 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1007 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1008
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001009- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1010 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1011 character other than a space.
1012
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001013- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1014 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1015 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1016 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1017 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1018 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1019 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1020 attributes with the same name.
1021
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001022- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1023 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1024 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1025 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1026 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1027 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1028 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1029 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1030 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1031 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1032 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1033 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1034 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1035 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001036
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001037- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1038 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1039 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1040 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1041 This has been repaired.
1042
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001043- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1044
1045- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1046
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001047- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1048 over a sequence.
1049
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001050- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001051 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001052
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001053- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1054
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001055- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1056 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1057 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1058 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1059 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1060 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1061 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1062 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1063
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001064- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1065 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1066 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1067
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001068- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1069 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1070 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1071 freelist.
1072
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001073- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1074 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1075
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001076- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1077 number.
1078
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001079- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1080 a TypeError exception.
1081
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001082- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1083 820195.
1084
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001085- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1086 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1087 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1088
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001089- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001090 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1091 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001092
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001093- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1094 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1095 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1096
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001097- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1098 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001099 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001100
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001101- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001102 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1103 the first call.
1104
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001105
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001106Extension modules
1107-----------------
1108
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001109- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1110 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1111
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001112- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1113 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1114 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1115 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1116 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1117 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1118 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001119
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001120- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1121
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001122- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1123
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001124- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1125 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1126
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001127- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1128 fewer false positives.
1129
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001130- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1131 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1132
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001133- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001134 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1135
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001136- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001137 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001138 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001139 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1140 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001141
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001142- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1143 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1144 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1145 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1146
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001147- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1148 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1149 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1150 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1151 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1152 #897625.
1153
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001154- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1155 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1156
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001157- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1158 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1159 and pops on either side of the deque.
1160
1161- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1162 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1163
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001164- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1165 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1166 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1167 other functions that expect a function argument.
1168
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001169- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1170
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001171- os.getsid was added.
1172
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001173- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1174 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1175 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1176
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001177- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1178
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001179- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1180
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001181- readline.clear_history was added.
1182
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001183- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1184
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001185- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1186
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001187- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1188
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001189- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1190
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001191- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1192
1193- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1194
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001195- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1196
1197- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1198
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001199- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1200 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1201 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1202
1203- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1204 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1205 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1206 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1207 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1208 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1209 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1210
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001211- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1212 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1213 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1214 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001215
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001216- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001217 iterators from a single iterable.
1218
1219- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1220 of raising a TypeError exception.
1221
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001222- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1223 as parameter.
1224
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001225Library
1226-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001227
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001228- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1229 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1230 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001231
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001232- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1233 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1234 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001235
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001236- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001237
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001238- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1239 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001240
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001241- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1242 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1243
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001244- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1245
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001246- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001247 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001248
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001249- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001250 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001251
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001252- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1253
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001254- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1255 on cygwin and mingw32.
1256
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001257- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1258
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001259- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1260 module.
1261
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001262- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1263 installation scheme for all platforms.
1264
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001265- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001266 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001267
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001268- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1269 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1270 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1271
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001272- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1273 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1274 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1275
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001276- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1277
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001278- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1279
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001280- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1281 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1282
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001283- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1284 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1285 type pattern with the same value exists.
1286
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001287- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1288 when run from the command prompt).
1289
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001290- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1291 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1292
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001293- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1294 default sort).
1295
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001296- Added global runctx function to profile module
1297
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001298- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1299
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001300- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1301
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001302- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1303
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001304- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001305 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1306 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1307 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1308 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1309 accordingly.
1310
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001311- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1312 decoding standards.
1313
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001314- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1315 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1316 called for all requests.
1317
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001318- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1319 they are passed to the compiler.
1320
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001321- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1322 indent, width and depth.
1323
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001324- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1325 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1326
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001327- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1328 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1329
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001330- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1331
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001332- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1333
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001334- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1335
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001336- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1337 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1338
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001339- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001340 for better performance.
1341
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001342- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001343
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001344- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1345 a string).
1346
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001347- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1348
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001349- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1350
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001351- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1352
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001353- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1354
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001355- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1356 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1357 list of fieldnames.
1358
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001359- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1360 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1361
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001362- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1363
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001364- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1365 empty lists.
1366
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001367- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1368 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1369 and shelves.
1370
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001371- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1372 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1373
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001374- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001375 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1376 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001377
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001378- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1379 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001380 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001381
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001382- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001383 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1384 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1385
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001386- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1387 and removed in Py2.4.
1388
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001389- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1390
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001391- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1392
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001393Tools/Demos
1394-----------
1395
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001396- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1397 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1398
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001399- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1400
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001401- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1402 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1403 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1404 destination in situations where both files are given.
1405
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001406- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1407 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1408 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1409 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1410
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001411- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1412
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001413- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1414 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1415 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1416 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1417 now.
1418
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001419- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1420 in effect
1421
1422- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1423 C-c C-h
1424
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001425- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1426 -d option was given.
1427
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001428Build
1429-----
1430
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001431- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1432 build under OS X.
1433
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001434- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1435 --enable-profiling.
1436
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001437- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1438 is configured --with-tsc.
1439
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001440- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1441 on AMD64.
1442
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001443- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1444 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1445
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001446- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1447 removed.
1448
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001449- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1450 supported (see PEP 11).
1451
1452- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1453
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001454- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1455
1456- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1457 (see PEP 11).
1458
1459- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1460 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1461
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001462C API
1463-----
1464
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001465- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1466 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1467 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1468
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001469- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1470 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1471 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1472 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1473
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001474- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1475 generator objects.
1476
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001477- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1478 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001479 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1480 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001481
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001482- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1483 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1484
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001485- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1486 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1487 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1488 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1489 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1490
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001491- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1492 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1493 about 10% faster.
1494
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001495- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1496 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1497
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001498- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1499 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1500 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1501 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1502
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001503Windows
1504-------
1505
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001506- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1507 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1508 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1509 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1510
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001511- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1512 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1513 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1514
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001515
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001516What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1517===============================
1518
1519*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1520
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001521IDLE
1522----
1523
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001524- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1525 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1526 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1527 context-menu actions.
1528
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001529- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1530 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1531 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1532 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1533 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1534 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1535 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1536 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1537 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1538
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001539
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001540What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1541=============================================
1542
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001543*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001544
1545Core and builtins
1546-----------------
1547
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001548- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001549 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001550 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1551
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001552Extension modules
1553-----------------
1554
1555- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1556 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1557 than once. This has been fixed.
1558
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001559- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1560 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1561 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1562 call.
1563
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001564- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1565
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001566Library
1567-------
1568
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001569- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1570 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1571
1572- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1573 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1574 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1575 restored.
1576
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001577IDLE
1578----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001579
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001580- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001581
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001582Build
1583-----
1584
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001585- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1586 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1587
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001588C API
1589-----
1590
1591Windows
1592-------
1593
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001594- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1595 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1596
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001597- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1598
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001599Mac
1600---
1601
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001602- Various fixes to pimp.
1603
1604- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1605
1606- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1607 more problems than it solves.
1608
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001609
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001610What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1611=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001612
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001613*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1614
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001615Core and builtins
1616-----------------
1617
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001618- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1619 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1620
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001621- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1622 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001623 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001624
1625- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1626 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1627 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001628 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001629
1630- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1631 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001632
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001633- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1634 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1635 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1636
1637- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001638 770247.
1639
1640- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001641
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001642Extension modules
1643-----------------
1644
1645- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1646 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1647
1648- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1649
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001650- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1651
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001652- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1653 contained within the _strptime module.
1654
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001655- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1656 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1657
1658- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001659 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1660
1661- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1662 the find_class attribute, if present.
1663
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001664- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001665
1666 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1667 (SF bug 763298).
1668
1669 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001670 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1671 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1672 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001673
1674 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1675
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001676Library
1677-------
1678
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001679- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1680
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001681- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1682 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1683 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1684 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1685 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1686 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1687 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1688 or Tester().
1689
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001690- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1691 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1692 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1693 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1694 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1695 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1696 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1697 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1698 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001699
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001700 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001701
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001702- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1703 weren't before was an oversight.
1704
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001705- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1706 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1707
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001708- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1709 when there are no lines.
1710
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001711- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1712 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1713
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001714- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1715 to child processes.
1716
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001717- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1718
1719- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1720
1721- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1722 xmlrpclib.
1723
1724- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1725 responses.
1726
1727- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1728 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1729
1730- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1731 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1732 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1733
1734- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1735 used as patterns.
1736
1737- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1738 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1739 than Tk 8.3.
1740
1741- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1742
1743- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001744
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001745Tools/Demos
1746-----------
1747
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001748- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1749
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001750- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1751
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001752- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001753
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001754Build
1755-----
1756
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001757- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1758
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001759- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1760
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001761- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1762 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001763
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001764- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1765 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1766 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001767
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001768C API
1769-----
1770
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001771- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1772 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1773
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001774Windows
1775-------
1776
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001777- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1778 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1779 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1780 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1781 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1782 Python exception ::
1783
1784 thread.error: can't start new thread
1785
1786 is raised now.
1787
1788- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1789 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1790 instead of from DLL teardown.
1791
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001792Mac
1793---
1794
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001795- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001796 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001797 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1798 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1799 the executable in the bundle.
1800
1801- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001802
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001803- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1804
1805- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1806 on Panther.
1807
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001808What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1809================================
1810
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001811*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001812
1813Core and builtins
1814-----------------
1815
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001816- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1817 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1818 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1819 with the -i option.
1820
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001821- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1822 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1823
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001824- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1825 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1826
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001827- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1828 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1829 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1830 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1831 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1832 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1833 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1834 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1835 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1836 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1837 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1838 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1839 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001840
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001841- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1842 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1843 embedded in a lambda expression.
1844
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001845- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1846 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1847 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1848 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1849 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1850
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001851- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1852 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1853 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1854
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001855- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1856 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1857
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001858- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1859 It's writable again.
1860
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001861- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1862 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1863 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001864 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001865
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001866- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1867 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1868 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1869
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001870Extension modules
1871-----------------
1872
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001873- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1874 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1875
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001876- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1877 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1878 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1879 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1880
1881- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1882 collection.
1883
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001884- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1885 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1886 unique within a single program run.
1887
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001888- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1889 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1890
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001891- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1892 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1893
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001894- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1895 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001896
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001897- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1898
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001899- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1900 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1901
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001902- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1903 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1904 for many BSD-derived systems.
1905
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001906
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001907Library
1908-------
1909
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001910- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1911 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1912 primary ones:
1913
1914 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1915 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1916 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1917
1918 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1919 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1920 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1921 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1922 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1923 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1924
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001925- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1926 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1927 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1928 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1929 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1930 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1931 argument.
1932
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001933- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1934 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1935 in the archive.
1936
1937- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1938 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1939
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001940- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1941 569574).
1942
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001943- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1944 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1945 no more.
1946
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001947- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1948 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1949 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1950 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1951 code coverage.
1952
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001953- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1954 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1955 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001956 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1957 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001958
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001959- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1960 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1961 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001962 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001963
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001964- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1965
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001966- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1967 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1968 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1969 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1970
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001971- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1972 handling.
1973
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001974- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1975 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1976
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001977- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1978 in socket.py.
1979
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001980- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1981
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001982- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1983 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1984 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1985 opener with proxy support.
1986
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001987- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1988
1989- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1990
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001991Tools/Demos
1992-----------
1993
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001994- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1995
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001996- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1997
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001998- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1999 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002000
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002001- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2002 files.
2003
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002004Build
2005-----
2006
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002007- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002008 different root directory.
2009
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002010C API
2011-----
2012
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002013- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2014 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2015 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2016 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2017 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2018 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2019 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2020 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2021 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2022 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2023
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002024- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2025 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2026 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2027 from Python.
2028
2029
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002030New platforms
2031-------------
2032
2033None this time.
2034
2035Tests
2036-----
2037
2038- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2039 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2040
2041Windows
2042-------
2043
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002044- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2045
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002046- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2047 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2048 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2049 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2050 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2051 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2052 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2053 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2054 that's what it's for.
2055
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002056Mac
2057---
2058
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002059- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2060 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2061 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2062 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002063- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2064 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2065- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002066
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002067SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2068------------------------------------
2069
2070430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2071598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2072622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2073661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2074683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2075697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2076713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2077724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2078727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2079729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2080730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2081731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2082732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2083733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2084735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2085740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2086744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2087745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2088747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2089749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2090751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2091753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2092755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2093757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2094760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2095
2096
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002097What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2098================================
2099
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002100*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002101
2102Core and builtins
2103-----------------
2104
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002105- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2106 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2107
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002108- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2109 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2110 and cannot be strings).
2111
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002112- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2113 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2114 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2115 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2116
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002117- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2118 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2119 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2120 Python itself.
2121
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002122- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2123 the referenced object, if it has one.
2124
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002125- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2126 the thread started at
2127 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2128
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002129- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2130 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2131 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2132 placed on a list index.
2133
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002134- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2135 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2136 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2137 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2138
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002139- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2140 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2141 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2142 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2143 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2144 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2145 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2146
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002147- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2148 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2149 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2150 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2151 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2152
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002153- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2154 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002155
2156- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2157 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2158 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2159 #693195.)
2160
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002161- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2162 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002163
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002164- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002165 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002166 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2167 interpreter executions, would fail.
2168
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002169- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002170 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002171 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002172
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002173Extension modules
2174-----------------
2175
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002176- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2177 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2178 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2179 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2180
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002181- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2182 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2183
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002184- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2185 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2186 and Greg Chapman.)
2187
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002188- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2189 recursively.
2190
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002191- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002192 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2193 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2194 leaks.
2195
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002196- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2197
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002198- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2199 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2200 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2201 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2202 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2203 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2204 #705836.
2205
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002206- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002207 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2208
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002209- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2210 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2211 See SF bug #692416.
2212
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002213- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2214 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2215
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002216- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2217 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2218 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002219
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002220- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002221 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2222 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2223
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002224- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2225 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2226 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2227 timeouts to work properly.
2228
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002229Library
2230-------
2231
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002232- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2233 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2234 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2235 future release.
2236
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002237- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2238 for querying platform dependent features.
2239
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002240- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002241
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002242- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2243 pickle protocol versions.
2244
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002245- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2246 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2247 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2248
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002249- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2250
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002251- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2252 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2253 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2254 modules.
2255
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002256- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2257 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2258 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2259
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002260- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2261 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2262
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002263- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2264 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2265 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2266
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002267- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002268 MS Office extensions.
2269
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002270- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2271 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2272
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002273- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2274 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2275
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002276- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2277 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2278 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2279 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2280 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2281 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2282
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002283- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2284 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2285 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002286
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002287- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2288 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2289 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2290
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002291- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2292
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002293- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2294 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2295 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2296
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002297Tools/Demos
2298-----------
2299
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002300- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2301 See the module docstring for details.
2302
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002303Build
2304-----
2305
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002306- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2307 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002308
2309C API
2310-----
2311
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002312- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2313
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002314- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2315 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2316 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2317
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002318- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2319 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002320
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002321 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2322 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2323 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002324
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002325- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002326 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2327
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002328- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2329 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2330 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002331
2332New platforms
2333-------------
2334
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002335None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002336
2337Tests
2338-----
2339
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002340- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2341 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002342
2343Windows
2344-------
2345
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002346- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2347 function.
2348
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002349- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2350 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002351
2352Mac
2353---
2354
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002355- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2356 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002357
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002358- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2359 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002360
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002361- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2362 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2363 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002364
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002365- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002366 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2367 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002368
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002369- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2370 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002371
2372
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002373What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2374=================================
2375
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002376*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002377
2378Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002379-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002380
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002381- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2382 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2383 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2384
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002385- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2386 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2387 (SF patch #664376.)
2388
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002389- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2390 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2391 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2392 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2393 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2394 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002395 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002396
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002397- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2398 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2399 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2400 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002401 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002402
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002403- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2404 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2405 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2406 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2407 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2408 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2409 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2410 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2411 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2412 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2413 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2414
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002415- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2416 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2417 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2418 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2419 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2420 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2421
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002422- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2423 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2424
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002425- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2426 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2427 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2428 case.)
2429
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002430- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2431 passed as unicode strings.
2432
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002433- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2434 See SF bug #683467.
2435
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002436- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2437 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2438
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002439- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2440
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002441- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2442
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002443- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2444 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2445 arguments.
2446
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002447- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2448 See SF bug #667147.
2449
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002450- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002451 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002452 See SF bug #676155.
2453
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002454- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002455 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002456 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2457 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2458 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2459 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2460 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2461 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002462
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002463Extension modules
2464-----------------
2465
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002466- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2467 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2468 tp_as_number pointer.
2469
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002470- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2471 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2472 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2473 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2474 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2475
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002476- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2477
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002478- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2479
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002480- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002481 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002482 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2483 patch #678531.)
2484
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002485- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2486 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2487
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002488- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2489 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2490
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002491- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2492
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002493- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2494 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2495 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2496
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002497- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2498
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002499- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2500 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2501
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002502- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002503
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002504- datetime changes:
2505
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002506 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2507
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002508 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2509 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2510 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2511 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2512 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2513 now.
2514
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002515 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002516 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2517 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002518
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002519 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002520 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002521 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2522 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2523 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2524 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002525
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002526 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2527 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2528 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002529 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2530
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002531 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2532 by a later example coded by Guido.
2533
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002534 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002535 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2536 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2537 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002538 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2539 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2540
2541 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2542 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2543 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2544 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2545 tzinfo subclass instance.
2546
2547 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2548 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2549 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2550 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2551 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2552 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2553 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2554 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002555
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002556 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2557 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2558 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2559 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2560 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002561 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2562
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002563 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002564
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002565 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2566 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2567 as a naive datetime object.
2568
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002569 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2570 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2571 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2572
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002573 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2574 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2575 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2576 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2577 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2578 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2579 comparison.
2580
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002581 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2582 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2583 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2584 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002585 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002586
2587 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002588
2589 and ::
2590
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002591 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2592
2593 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2594 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2595 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2596 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2597
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002598 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2599 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2600 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2601 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2602 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2603
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002604 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2605 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002606 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2607 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002608
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002609Library
2610-------
2611
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002612- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2613 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2614
2615- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2616 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2617 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2618 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2619 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2620 See PEP 307 for details.
2621
2622- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2623 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2624
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002625- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2626 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002627 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002628 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2629 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002630 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002631
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002632- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2633 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2634
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002635- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2636 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2637 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2638
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002639- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2640
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002641- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2642 exception.
2643
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002644- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2645 class.
2646
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002647- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2648 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2649 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2650
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002651- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2652 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2653
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002654- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002655 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2656 See SF bug #659228.
2657
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002658- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2659 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2660 See SF patch #651082.
2661
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002662- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002663
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002664- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2665 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2666
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002667- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002668 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002669
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002670- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2671 DOS paths from other platforms.
2672
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002673Tools/Demos
2674-----------
2675
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002676- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2677 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2678 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2679 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2680 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2681 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2682 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2683 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2684 example:
2685
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002686 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2687 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002688
2689 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2690
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002691
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002692Build
2693-----
2694
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002695- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2696 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2697 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002698 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2699
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002700 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2701
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002702- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2703 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2704 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2705 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2706 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2707 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2708 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2709 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2710 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2711
2712- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2713 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2714 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2715 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2716
2717- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2718 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2719
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002720C API
2721-----
2722
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002723- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2724 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002725
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002726- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2727 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2728 tp_as_number pointer.
2729
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002730- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2731 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2732 (SF #681367)
2733
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002734- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2735 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2736 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2737 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002738
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002739Tests
2740-----
2741
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002742- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002743 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2744 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2745 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2746 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2747 pydoc.)
2748
2749- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2750
2751- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002752
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002753Windows
2754-------
2755
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002756- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2757 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2758 time).
2759
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002760- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2761 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2762
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002763- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2764 release without strong cryptography.
2765
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002766- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002767 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002768
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002769- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2770 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2771
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002772Mac
2773---
2774
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002775- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2776 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002777
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002778- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2779 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2780 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002781
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002782- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2783 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002784
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002785- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2786 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2787 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2788 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002789
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002790- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002791 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2792 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2793 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002794
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002795
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002796What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002797=================================
2798
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002799*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002800
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002801Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002802--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002803
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002804- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2805
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002806- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2807 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002808 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002809 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002810 a different meaning than before.
2811
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002812- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002813 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002814 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002815
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002816- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002817 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002818 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002819
2820- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2821 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2822 and deallocation.
2823
2824- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2825 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2826
2827- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2828 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2829 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2830 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2831 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2832
2833- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2834 now detected by the garbage collector.
2835
2836- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2837 [SF bug 519621]
2838
2839- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2840 identifier.
2841
2842- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2843 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2844 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2845 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2846 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2847 [SF bug 563060]
2848
2849- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2850 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2851 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2852 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2853 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2854
2855- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2856 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2857 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2858
2859- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2860
2861- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2862 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2863 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2864 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2865 state of the slots would be lost.)
2866
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002867Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002868-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002869
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002870- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002871 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2872 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2873 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2874 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002875 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2876 Jython 2.1.
2877
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002878- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002879 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002880 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2881 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2882 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2883 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2884 these, see PEP 302.
2885
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002886- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2887 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2888 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2889
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002890- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2891 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2892 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2893
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002894- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2895 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2896 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2897
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002898- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2899 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2900 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2901 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2902 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2903 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2904 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2905 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2906 releases or implementations.
2907
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002908- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002909 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2910 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002911
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002912- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2913 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2914
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002915- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2916 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2917 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2918
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002919- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2920 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2921
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002922- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2923 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002924 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2925 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002926
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002927- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2928 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2929 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2930 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2931 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2932
2933 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2934 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2935 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2936 pattern.
2937
2938 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2939 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2940 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2941 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2942
2943 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2944 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2945 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2946 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2947 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2948 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2949
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002950- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2951 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2952 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2953 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2954 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2955 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2956 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2957 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002958
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002959- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2960 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2961 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2962 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2963 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002964 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2965 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2966 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2967 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2968 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2969 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2970 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002971
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002972- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2973 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2974
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002975- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2976 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2977 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2978 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2979 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2980 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2981 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2982 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2983 to Zack Weinberg!
2984
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002985- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2986 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2987 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2988 type. This has been fixed now.
2989
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002990- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2991 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2992 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2993
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002994- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2995 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2996 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2997 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2998 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2999 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3000 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3001 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003002 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003003
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003004- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3005 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3006 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003007
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003008- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3009 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3010 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3011 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3012 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3013 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3014 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3015 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003016 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003017 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3018 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3019
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003020- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3021 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3022 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3023 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3024 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3025 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3026 this.)
3027
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003028- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3029 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003030 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003031 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003032 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3033 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003034 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3035 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003036
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003037- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3038 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3039 currently running.
3040
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003041- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3042 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3043 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3044 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3045
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003046- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3047 as directory names.
3048
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003049- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3050 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3051
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003052- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3053 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3054
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003055- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003056 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3057 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003058
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003059- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3060 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3061 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3062 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3063 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3064
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003065- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3066 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3067 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3068 removed.
3069
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003070- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3071 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3072 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3073
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003074- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3075 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3076 to __debug__.
3077
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003078- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3079 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3080 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3081
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003082- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3083 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3084 deprecated now.
3085
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003086- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3087 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3088 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003089
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003090- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3091 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3092 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3093 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3094 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003095
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003096- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3097 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3098
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003099- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3100 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3101 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003102 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003103 is backward compatible.
3104
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003105- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3106 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3107 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3108 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3109 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3110
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003111- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3112 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3113 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3114 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3115 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3116 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003117
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003118- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3119 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3120
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003121- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3122 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3123
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003124- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3125 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3126 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3127 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3128 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3129
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003130- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3131 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3132 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3133
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003134- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003135 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3136
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003137- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3138 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3139 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003140
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003141- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3142 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3143
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003144- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3145 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3146 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3147
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003148- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3149
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003150Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003151-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003152
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003153- Added three operators to the operator module:
3154 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3155 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3156 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3157
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003158- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3159
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003160- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3161 archives.
3162
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003163- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3164 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3165 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3166
3167 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3168
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003169- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3170 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3171 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003172 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003173
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003174- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3175 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3176 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3177 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003178 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3179 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3180 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3181 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003182
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003183- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3184 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003185
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003186- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3187
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003188- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3189 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3190
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003191- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3192 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3193 supported.
3194
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003195- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3196
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003197- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3198 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003199
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003200- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3201 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3202
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003203- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3204
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003205- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3206 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3207
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003208- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3209 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3210 functions but callable type objects.
3211
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003212- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003213 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003214 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003215
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003216- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3217 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003218
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003219- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3220 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003221
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003222- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3223 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3224 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3225 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3226
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003227- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3228 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003229
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003230- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3231 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3232 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3233 and __imul__.
3234
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003235- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003236 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3237 is called.
3238
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003239- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3240 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3241 interpreter was compiled.
3242
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003243- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3244 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3245 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003246 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003247 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3248 1, not 2.
3249
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003250- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3251 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3252 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3253 limit.
3254
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003255- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3256 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3257 bug #623464.
3258
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003259- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3260 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3261 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3262 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3263
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003264Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003265-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003266
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003267- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3268
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003269- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3270 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3271 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3272 with Python 2.3a2.
3273
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003274- os.path exposes getctime.
3275
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003276- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003277 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003278 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003279 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003280 unit tests of floating point results.
3281
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003282- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3283 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3284 has been increased.
3285
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003286- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3287 executed.
3288
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003289- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3290 postinstallation script.
3291
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003292- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3293 test the current module.
3294
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003295- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003296 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3297 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3298 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3299 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3300
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003301- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003302 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003303 Ward's Optik package.
3304
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003305- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3306 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3307 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3308 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3309
3310- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3311 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003312 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003313
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003314- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3315 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3316 shelf are binary pickles.
3317
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003318- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3319 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3320
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003321- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3322 modules are iterators now.
3323
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003324- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3325 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3326 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3327 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3328 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3329 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003330
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003331- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3332 with their entity value.
3333
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003334- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3335
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003336- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3337 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003338
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003339- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3340 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003341 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003342
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003343- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3344 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3345 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3346 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3347 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3348 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3349 main():
3350
3351 import locale
3352 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3353
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003354- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3355 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3356
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003357- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3358 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3359 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3360 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3361 to the new standard.
3362
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003363- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3364 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3365 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3366 an extension to the database.
3367
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003368- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3369 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3370 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3371 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003372 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003373
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003374- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003375 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003376
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003377- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3378 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3379 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3380 bounded integers.
3381
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003382- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3383 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3384 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3385 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3386 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3387 in existence.
3388
3389 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3390 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3391 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3392 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3393 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3394 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3395
3396 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3397 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3398 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3399 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3400
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003401- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3402 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3403 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3404
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003405- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3406
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003407- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3408 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3409 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3410 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3411
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003412- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3413 argument.
3414
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003415- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3416 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3417 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3418 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3419 [SF patch 560794].
3420
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003421- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3422 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3423 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003424 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3425 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3426 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003427
3428- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3429 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003430
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003431- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3432 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3433 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3434 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003435
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003436- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3437 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3438 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3439 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3440 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3441
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003442- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003443
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003444- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3445
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003446- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3447 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3448 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3449 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3450 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3451 identical to None.
3452
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003453- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3454 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3455 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3456 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3457 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3458 results now.
3459
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003460- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3461 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3462
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003463- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3464 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3465 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3466 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3467 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3468 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3469 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3470 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3471
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003472- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3473
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003474- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3475 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3476
3477- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3478 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3479 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3480 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3481 and other systems.
3482
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003483- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3484 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3485 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3486 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 +00003487 work well with these.
3488
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003489- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3490
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003491- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003492 connections.
3493
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003494- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3495 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3496 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3497
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003498- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3499 sets
3500
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003501- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3502 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3503 name.
3504
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003505- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3506 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3507 passed in.
3508
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003509- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003510 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003511 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3512 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003513
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003514- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3515
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003516- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3517
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003518- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3519 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3520 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3521
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003522- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3523 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3524 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3525 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003526 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003527
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003528- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003529 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003530 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003531
3532- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3533 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3534 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3535
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003536- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003537 the value of its expression argument.
3538
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003539- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3540 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3541 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3542
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003543- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3544 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3545 skipstone browser was included.
3546
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003547- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3548 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3549
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003550Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003551-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003552
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003553- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3554 names in addition to accepting file names.
3555
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003556- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3557 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3558 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3559 still used and useful.)
3560
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003561- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3562 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3563 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3564 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003565
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003566- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3567 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3568 the generated binary.
3569
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003570Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003571-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003572
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003573- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3574
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003575- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3576 except in the hands of experts.
3577
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003578- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003579 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3580 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3581 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003582
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003583- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3584 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3585 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3586 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3587 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3588 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3589 builds.
3590
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003591- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3592 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3593 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3594 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3595 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3596 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3597 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3598 new type.
3599
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003600- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003601
3602 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3603 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3604 positive infinities.
3605
3606 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3607 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3608 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3609 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3610 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3611 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3612 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3613
3614 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3615
3616 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3617
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003618- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3619 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3620 size of the executable.
3621
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003622- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3623 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3624 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3625 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003626
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003627- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3628
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003629- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3630 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3631 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003632
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003633- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3634 well as Unix.
3635
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003636- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3637 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3638 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3639 modules in the README file for details.
3640
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003641C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003642-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003643
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003644- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3645 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003646 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003647 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003648 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003649
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003650- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3651 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3652 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3653 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3654 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3655 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003656 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003657 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3658 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3659 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3660 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3661 aligned.)
3662
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003663- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3664 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3665 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3666
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003667- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3668 level.
3669
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003670- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3671 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3672 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3673 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3674 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3675
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003676- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3677 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3678 code.
3679
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003680- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3681 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3682 adjusting for negative indices.
3683
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003684- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3685 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3686 object.
3687
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003688- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3689 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3690 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3691
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003692- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3693 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003694
3695- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3696
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003697- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3698 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3699 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3700 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3701
3702- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3703
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003704- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003705
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003706- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003707 without going through the buffer API.
3708
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003709- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003710
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003711- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3712 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3713 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3714 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3715
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003716- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3717 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3718
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003719- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003720 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3721
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003722New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003723-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003724
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003725- OpenVMS is now supported.
3726
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003727- AtheOS is now supported.
3728
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003729- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3730
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003731- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3732
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003733Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003734-----
3735
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003736- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3737 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3738 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003739
3740Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003741-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003742
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003743- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3744 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3745 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3746 bugs.
3747 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003748 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003749 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3750 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003751 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003752
3753- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003754 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003755
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003756- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3757 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3758
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003759- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3760 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003761 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003762 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3763
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003764- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3765 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3766 use files" uninstall option).
3767
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003768- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3769
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003770- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3771 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3772
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003773- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3774 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3775 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3776
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003777- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3778 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3779 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3780 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3781 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003782 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3783 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3784 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003785
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003786- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003787 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003788 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3789 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3790 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3791 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3792 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3793 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3794 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3795 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3796 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3797 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3798 work around.
3799
3800- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3801 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3802 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3803 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3804 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3805 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3806 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3807 specified with O_CREAT too).
3808
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003809Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003810----
3811
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003812- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003813
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003814- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3815 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3816 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3817
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003818- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3819 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3820 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3821
3822- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3823 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3824 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3825 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3826 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3827 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3828 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3829 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003830
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003831- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3832 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3833 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003834
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003835- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3836 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3837 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3838 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3839 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003840
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003841- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3842 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3843 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003844
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003845- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3846 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003847
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003848- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3849 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3850 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3851 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3852 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003853
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003854- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3855 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3856 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3857
3858- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3859 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3860 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003861
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003862- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3863 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3864 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3865 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003866 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003867
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003868- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3869 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003870
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003871- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3872 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003873
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003874- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003875 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003876 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3877 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003878
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003879
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003880What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003881===============================
3882
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003883*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3884
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003885Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003886--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003887
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003888- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3889 with a custom metaclass.
3890
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003891Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003892-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003893
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003894- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3895 are proxies.
3896
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003897Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003898-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003899
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003900- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3901 very short strings.
3902
3903- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3904 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3905 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3906 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3907 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3908
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003909Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003910-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003911
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003912- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3913 close or delete time).
3914
3915- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3916 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3917
3918- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3919
3920- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003921 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003922
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003923Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003924-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003925
3926Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003927-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003928
3929C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003930-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003931
3932New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003933-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003934
3935Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003936-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003937
3938Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003939-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003940
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003941- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3942
3943- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3944 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3945
3946- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3947 deleted at process exit time.
3948
3949- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3950 in backslash.
3951
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003952Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003953----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003954
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003955- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3956 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3957 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3958
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003959
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003960What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003961===========================
3962
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003963*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3964
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003965Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003966--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003967
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003968- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3969 been extensively updated. See
3970
3971 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3972
3973 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3974
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003975- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3976 deleted!
3977
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003978- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3979 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3980 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3981 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3982 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3983
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003984- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3985
3986 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3987 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3988
3989 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3990 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3991 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3992 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3993 supported anyway.
3994
3995 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3996 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3997
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003998- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3999 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4000 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4001 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4002 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004003
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004004- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4005 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4006 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4007
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004008Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004009-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004010
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004011- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4012 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4013 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4014 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4015 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4016 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004017 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4018 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4019 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4020 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004021
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004022- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4023 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4024 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4025
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004026Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004027-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004028
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004029- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4030
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004031Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004032-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004033
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004034- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4035 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4036 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4037 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4038 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4039 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4040
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004041- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4042
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004043- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4044
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004045- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4046
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004047- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4048 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4049 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4050
4051- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4052
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004053Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004054-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004055
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004056- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4057 off a search on Google.
4058
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004059Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004060-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004061
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004062- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4063 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4064 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4065 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4066 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4067 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4068 other platforms should do likewise.
4069
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004070- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4071 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4072 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4073
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004074C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004075-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004076
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004077- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4078 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4079 producing key-value pairs.
4080
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004081- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004082 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004083 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4084 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4085 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4086 previously went unchallenged.
4087
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004088New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004089-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004090
4091Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004092-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004093
4094Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004095-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004096
4097Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004098----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004099
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004100- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4101 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004102
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004103- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4104 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4105 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4106 home.
4107
4108
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004109What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004110===========================
4111
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004112*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4113
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004114Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004115--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004116
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004117- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4118 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004119
4120 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004121 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004122
4123 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4124 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004125 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004126 This needs to be documented.
4127
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004128- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4129 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4130
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004131- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4132 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4133 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4134
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004135- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4136 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4137
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004138- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4139 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4140 class forbids it).
4141
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004142- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4143 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4144 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4145
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004146- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4147
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004148Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004149-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004150
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004151- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4152 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004153 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004154
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004155- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4156 (like 1 + '').
4157
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004158Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004159-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004160
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004161- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4162 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4163 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4164 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004165 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004166 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4167
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004168- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4169 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4170 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4171 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4172
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004173- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4174 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004175 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4176 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4177 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004178
4179- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4180 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004181
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004182- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4183 bytes on its input.
4184
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004185Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004186-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004187
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004188- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004189 convenience function.
4190
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004191- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4192 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4193 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004194 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4195 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4196 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4197 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4198 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4199 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004200
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004201- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4202 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4203 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4204 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4205
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004206- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4207 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4208 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4209
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004210- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4211 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4212 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4213 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4214
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004215- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4216 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004217 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004218 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4219 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4220 new -l and -e options.
4221
4222- statcache is now deprecated.
4223
4224- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4225 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004226 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004227 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4228 time properly taken into account.
4229
4230- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4231 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4232 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4233 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4234
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004235Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004236-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004237
4238Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004239-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004240
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004241- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4242 is built with libdb3 if available.
4243
4244- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4245
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004246C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004247-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004248
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004249- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4250 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4251 PySequence_Size().
4252
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004253- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4254
4255- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4256 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4257 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4258
4259- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4260 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4261
4262- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4263 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4264
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004265New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004266-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004267
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004268- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4269 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4270
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004271- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4272 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4273
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004274- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4275
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004276Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004277-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004278
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004279- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4280 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4281
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004282Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004283-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004284
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004285Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004286----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004287
4288- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4289 removed completely in the next release.
4290
4291- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4292 OSX.
4293
4294- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4295 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4296
4297- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4298
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004299
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004300What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004301===========================
4302
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004303*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4304
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004305Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004307
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004308- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004309 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004310 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004311 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4312 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004313 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4314 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004315 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4316 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004317
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004318- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4319 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4320
4321- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4322 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4323
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004324Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004325-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004326
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004327- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4328 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4329 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4330 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4331 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4332 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4333 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4334 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4335
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004336- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4337 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4338 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4339 example).
4340
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004341- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004342 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004343 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004344 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004345
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004346- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4347 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4348 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004349 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004350
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004351- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4352 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4353 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4354 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4355 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4356 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4357
4358 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4359
4360 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4361
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004362Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004363-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004364
4365- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4366
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004367- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4368
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004369- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4370 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004371
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004372- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4373 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4374 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4375 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4376 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4377 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004378 attributes.
4379
4380- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4381 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4382 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004383
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004384- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4385 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4386 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004387
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004388- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4389 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4390 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004391 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4392 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4393
4394- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4395 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004396
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004397Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004398-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004399
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004400- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4401 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4402
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004403- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4404 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4405 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4406 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4407
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004408- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4409 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4410 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4411 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4412
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004413 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4414 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4415 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4416 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4417 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4418 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4419 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4420 without losing information).
4421
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004422- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004423 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4424 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4425 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4426 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4427 module).
4428
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004429 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004430 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4431 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4432 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4433 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004434
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004435- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004436 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4437 encoding.
4438
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004439- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4440 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4441
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004443 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4444
4445- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4446 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4447 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4448 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4449
4450- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4451
4452- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4453 ON, and OFF.
4454
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004455- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4456 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4457
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004458Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004459-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004460
4461- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4462 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4463 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004464
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004465- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4466 been added: -X and -E.
4467
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004468Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004470
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004471- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4472 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4473
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004474C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004475-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004476
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004477- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4478 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4479 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4480 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4481 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4482
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004483- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4484 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4485 as long) arguments.
4486
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004487- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4488 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4489 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4490 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4491 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4492 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4493
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004494- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4495 input.
4496
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004497New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004498-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004499
4500Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004501-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004502
4503Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004505
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004506- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4507 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4508 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4509
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004510- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4511 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4512 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004513 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004514
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004515 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4516 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4517 import signal
4518 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004519
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004520 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004521 while 1:
4522 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004523 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004524 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4525 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4526 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4527 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004528
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004529
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004530What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4531===========================
4532
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004533*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4534
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004535Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004536--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004537
4538- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4539 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4540 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4541
4542- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4543 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4544 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4545 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4546 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4547 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4548 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004549
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004550- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004551 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004552 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4553 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4554 associate a docstring with a property.
4555
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004556- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4557 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4558 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4559 other built-in object types.
4560
4561- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4562 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4563 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4564 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4565 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4566
4567- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4568 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4569
4570- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4571 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004572 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004573 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4574 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4575 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4576 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4577 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4578
4579- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4580 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4581 class.
4582
4583- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4584 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4585 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4586 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4587
4588- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4589 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4590 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4591 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4592
4593- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4594 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4595
4596- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4597 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4598 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4599 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4600 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004601 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004602 with the same value as s.
4603
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004604- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4605
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004606Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004607----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004608
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004609- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4610
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004611- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4612 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4613 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4614 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4615 objects.
4616
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004617- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4618 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004619 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4620 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4621
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004622- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4623 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4624 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4625
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004626Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004627-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004628
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004629- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4630 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4631 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4632 by the instances.
4633
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004634- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4635 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4636 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4637
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004638- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4639 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4640 before the entire comparison is complete.
4641
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004642- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4643 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4644 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4645
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004646- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4647 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4648 getwriter().
4649
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004650- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4651 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4652
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004653- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004654 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4655 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4656
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004657- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4658 iterable object.
4659
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004660- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4661 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004662
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004663- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4664 authentication.
4665
4666- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4667 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004668
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004669- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004670 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4671 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4672 a sample driver.)
4673
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004674Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004675-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004676
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004677- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4678 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4679 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4680 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4681 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4682 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4683 kernel has large file support.
4684
4685- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4686 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4687 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4688 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4689 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4690
4691- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4692 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4693 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4694
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004695C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004696-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004697
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004698- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4699 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4700
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004701New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004702-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004703
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004704- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4705 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4706
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004707Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004708-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004709
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004710- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4711 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4712 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4713 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4714 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4715
4716- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4717 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4718 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4719 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4720
4721- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4722 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4723
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004724Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004725-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004726
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004727- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004728 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4729 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004730
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004731
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004732What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4733===========================
4734
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004735*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4736
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004737Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004738----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004739
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004740- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4741 big to represent as a C double.
4742
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004743- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4744 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4745 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4746 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4747 restriction).
4748
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004749- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4750 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4751 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4752 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4753 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4754
4755 >>> dir([])
4756 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4757 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4758 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4759 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4760 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4761 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4762 'reverse', 'sort']
4763
4764 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4765
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004766- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004767 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4768 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4769 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4770 OverflowError exception.
4771
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004772- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004773 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004774 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4775 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4776 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4777 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4778 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004779 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004780 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4781 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4782
4783 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4784 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4785 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4786 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004787
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004788- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004789 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4790 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4791 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4792 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4793 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4794 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4795 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4796 once it is created.
4797
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004798- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4799 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4800 (key, value) pairs.
4801
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004802- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004803 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4804 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4805
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004806- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4807 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4808 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4809 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4810 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004811
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004812- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004813 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4814 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4815
4816 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4817
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004818- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004819 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4820
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004821Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004822-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004823
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004824- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004825 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4826 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004827
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004828- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4829 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4830 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4831 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4832 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4833 in this area anymore).
4834
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004835- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4836 threading.Timer.
4837
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004838- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4839 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4840
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004841- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004842 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4843
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004844- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004845 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4846 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4847 converted to Python longs.
4848
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004849- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004850 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4851
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004852- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4853 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4854 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4855
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004856Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004857-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004858
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004859- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4860 division operators as per PEP 238.
4861
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004862Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004863-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004864
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004865- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4866 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4867 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4868 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4869
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004870C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004871-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004872
4873- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004874
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004875- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4876 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004877 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004878
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004879 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4880 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004881 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004882 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004883
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004884- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004885 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4886 module:
4887
4888 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004889
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004890 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4891 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004892
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004893 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4894 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004895
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004896 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4897
4898 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4899
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004900- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004901 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4902 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4903 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004904
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004905New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004906-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004907
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004908- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4909 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4910 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4911 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4912 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004913
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004914Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004915-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004916
4917Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004918-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004919
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004920- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4921 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4922 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4923 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004924 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4925 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4926 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4927 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4928 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004929
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004930- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004931 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4932
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004933
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004934What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4935===========================
4936
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004937*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4938
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004939Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004940-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004941
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004942- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4943 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4944
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004945- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4946 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4947 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004948
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004949- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4950 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4951 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4952 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004953
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004954- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4955
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004956- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004957
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004958Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004959-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004960
4961- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004962 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004963 the module docstring for details.
4964
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004965Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004966-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004967
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004968- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004969 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4970 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4971 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004972
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004973- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4974 Nick Mathewson.
4975
4976Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004977----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004978
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004979- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4980 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4981 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4982 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4983 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4984 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4985 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4986 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4987
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004988- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4989 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4990 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4991 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4992
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004993- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4994 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4995 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4996 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4997 come a long way).
4998
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004999- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5000 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5001 write filters for these warnings).
5002
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005003- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5004 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5005 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5006 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5007 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5008
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005009- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5010 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5011 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5012 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5013 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5014 older distribution.
5015
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005016Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005017-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005018
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005019- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5020 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005021 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005022
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005023- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5024 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5025 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5026
5027- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5028
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005029- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5030
5031- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5032
5033- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5034
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005035- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005036
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005037- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5038
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005039New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005040-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005041
5042C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005043-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005044
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005045- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5046 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5047 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5048 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5049 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5050 against buffer overruns.
5051
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005052- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005053 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5054 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005055 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5056 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5057 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5058
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005059- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5060 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5061 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5062 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5063 deprecated.
5064
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005065Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005066-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005067
5068- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5069 relevant is found.
5070
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005071
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005072What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005073===========================
5074
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005075*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5076
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005077Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005078----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005079
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005080- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5081 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5082 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5083 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5084 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5085 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5086 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5087 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005088 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005089 repaired.
5090
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005091- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005092 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005093 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5094 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5095 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5096 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5097 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5098 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5099 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5100 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5101
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005102- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5103 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5104 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5105 leading BMO character).
5106
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005107- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5108 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5109 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5110
5111 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5112 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5113 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005114
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005115 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5116 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5117 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5118 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5119 for various simple to use conversions.
5120
5121 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5122 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5123
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005124 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5125 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5126 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5127 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5128 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5129 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5130 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5131 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5132 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5133 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5134 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5135 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5136 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5137 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5138 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005139
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005140- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5141 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5142 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005143 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005144 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005145
5146 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005147 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5148 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5149 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5150 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5151 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005152 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5153 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005154
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005155 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5156 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5157 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005158 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005159
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005160- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5161 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5162 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5163 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5164 floating arithmetic,
5165
5166 x = 9007199254740992.0
5167 print long(x)
5168
5169 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5170 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5171 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5172 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5173 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5174 functions are of good quality).
5175
5176 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5177 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5178 algorithms to break.
5179
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005180- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5181 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5182 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5183 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5184 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5185 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5186 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5187 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5188 order.
5189
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005190- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5191 operation along the most common code paths.
5192
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005193- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5194 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5195
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005196- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5197 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5198 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5199 {}.update(UserDict())
5200
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005201- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5202 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5203 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5204 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5205 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5206 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5207 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5208 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5209
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005210- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005211 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005212
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005213 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005214 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5215 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005216 join() method of strings
5217 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005218 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5219 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005220 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005221 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005222
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005223- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5224 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5225
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005226- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5227 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5228
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005229- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5230 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5231 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5232 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5233
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005234- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5235 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005236 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005237 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5238 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005239
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005240- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5241
5242
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005243Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005244-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005245
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005246- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005247 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005248 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5249 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5250
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005251- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5252 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5253
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005254- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5255 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5256 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5257 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5258
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005259- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5260 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5261 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5262
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005263- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5264
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005265- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5266
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005267- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5268 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5269 that are still imported into string.py).
5270
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005271- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5272
5273- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5274 Now it does.
5275
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005276- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5277
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005278- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5279 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5280 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5281 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5282 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005283 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5284 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005285
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005286- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5287 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5288 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5289 'help(object)'.
5290
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005291Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005292-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005293
5294- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005295 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005296 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5297 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5298
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005299- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005300 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5301 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005302
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005303C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005304-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005305
5306- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5307 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005308
5309----
5310
5311**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**