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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000015- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000016 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000017
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000018- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000019 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000020 which was missing for no apparent reason.
21
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000022- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000023 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
24 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
25
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000026- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
27 types that support garbage collection.
28
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000029- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
30
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000031- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
32 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
33 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
34 Jython.
35
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000036Extension modules
37-----------------
38
39Library
40-------
41
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +000042- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
43 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
44 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
45 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
46
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +000047- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
48 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
49
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +000050- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
51 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
52 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
53 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
54 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
55 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
56 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
57 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
58 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
59 by some other method in progress).
60
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000061- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
62 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
63 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +000064
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +000065- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
66
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +000067- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
68 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
69 AM Kuchling.
70
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000071- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
72 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
73 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
74
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +000075- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
76 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
77 instead of unsigned.
78
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000079- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +000080 no longer part of the public API.
81
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +000082- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
83 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
84 string methods of the same name).
85
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +000086- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
87 SF patch 982681.
88
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000089- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +000090 SF patch 945642.
91
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000092- doctest unittest integration improvements:
93
94 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
95
96 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
97 DocTestSuites.
98
99- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
100 that provide thread-local data.
101
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000102- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
103 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
104
105
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000106Tools/Demos
107-----------
108
109Build
110-----
111
112C API
113-----
114
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000115- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
116 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
117
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000118Documentation
119-------------
120
121Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
122
123 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
124 assigning thier values
125
126 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
127
128 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
129
130
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000131New platforms
132-------------
133
134Tests
135-----
136
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000137- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
138 platforms that use the Makefile.
139
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000140Windows
141-------
142
143Mac
144---
145
146
147
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000148What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
149=================================
150
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000151*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000152
153Core and builtins
154-----------------
155
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000156- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
157 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
158 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
159 objects now (one object instead of three).
160
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000161- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
162 Windows DLLs.
163
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000164- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
165
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000166- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
167 a new .pyc magic.
168
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000169- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
170 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
171 be there.
172
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000173- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
174 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
175 the LC_NUMERIC category.
176
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000177- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
178 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
179 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
180
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000181- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
182
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000183- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
184 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
185 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000186
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000187- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
188 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
189
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000190- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
191
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000192- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000193 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000194
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000195- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
196
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000197- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
198
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000199- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
200 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
201
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000202- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
203 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
204 Fixes bug #858016 .
205
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000206- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
207 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
208 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
209
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000210- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
211 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
212 improves their performance (about 35%).
213
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000214- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
215 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
216 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
217
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000218- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
219 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
220 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
221 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
222
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000223- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
224 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
225 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
226 length is not known).
227
228- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
229 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000230 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
231 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000232 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
233
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000234- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
235 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
236
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000237- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
238 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
239 keyword arguments.
240
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000241- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
242 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
243 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
244
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000245- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
246 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
247 cases.
248
249- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
250 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
251 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
252 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
253 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
254 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
255 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
256 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
257 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
258 a release build.
259
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000260- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
261 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
262
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000263- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000264 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000265
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000266- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
267 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
268 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
269 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
270 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
271 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
272 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
273 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
274 destroyed.
275
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000276- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
277 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
278 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
279 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
280 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
281 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
282 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
283 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
284
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000285- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
286 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
287 character other than a space.
288
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000289- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
290 by the function object or by the method object, the function
291 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
292 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
293 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
294 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
295 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
296 attributes with the same name.
297
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000298- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
299 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
300 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
301 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
302 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
303 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
304 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
305 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
306 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
307 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
308 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
309 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
310 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
311 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000312
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000313- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
314 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
315 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
316 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
317 This has been repaired.
318
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000319- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
320
321- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
322
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000323- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
324 over a sequence.
325
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000326- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000327 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000328
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000329- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
330
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000331- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
332 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
333 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
334 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
335 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
336 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
337 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
338 records with equal keys is unchanged).
339
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000340- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
341 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
342 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
343
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000344- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
345 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
346 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
347 freelist.
348
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000349- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
350 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
351
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000352- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
353 number.
354
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000355- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
356 a TypeError exception.
357
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000358- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
359 820195.
360
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000361- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
362 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
363 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
364
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000365- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000366 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
367 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000368
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000369- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
370 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
371 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
372
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000373- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
374 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000375 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000376
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000377- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000378 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
379 the first call.
380
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000381
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000382Extension modules
383-----------------
384
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000385- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
386 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
387
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000388- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
389 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
390 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
391 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
392 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
393 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
394 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000395
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000396- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
397
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000398- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
399
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000400- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
401 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
402
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000403- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
404 fewer false positives.
405
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000406- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
407 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
408
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000409- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000410 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
411
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000412- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000413 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000414 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
415 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
416 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000417
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000418- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
419 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
420 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
421 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
422
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000423- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
424 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
425 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
426 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
427 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
428 #897625.
429
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000430- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
431 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
432
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000433- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
434 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
435 and pops on either side of the deque.
436
437- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
438 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
439
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000440- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
441 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
442 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
443 other functions that expect a function argument.
444
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000445- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
446
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000447- os.getsid was added.
448
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000449- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
450 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
451 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
452
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000453- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
454
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000455- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
456
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000457- readline.clear_history was added.
458
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000459- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
460
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000461- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
462
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000463- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
464
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000465- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
466
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000467- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
468
469- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
470
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000471- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
472
473- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
474
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000475- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
476 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
477 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
478
479- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
480 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
481 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
482 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
483 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
484 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
485 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
486
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000487- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
488 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
489 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
490 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000491
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000492- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000493 iterators from a single iterable.
494
495- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
496 of raising a TypeError exception.
497
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000498- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
499 as parameter.
500
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000501Library
502-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000503
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000504- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
505 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
506 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000507
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000508- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
509 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
510 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000511
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000512- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000513
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000514- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
515 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000516
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000517- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
518 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
519
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000520- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
521
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000522- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000523 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000524
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000525- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
526 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
527
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000528- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
529
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000530- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
531 on cygwin and mingw32.
532
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000533- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
534
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000535- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
536 module.
537
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000538- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
539 installation scheme for all platforms.
540
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000541- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000542 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000543
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000544- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
545 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
546 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
547
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000548- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
549 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
550 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
551
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000552- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
553
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000554- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
555
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000556- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
557 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
558
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000559- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
560 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
561 type pattern with the same value exists.
562
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000563- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
564 when run from the command prompt).
565
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000566- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
567 not taken into consideration when caching value.
568
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000569- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
570 default sort).
571
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000572- Added global runctx function to profile module
573
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000574- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
575
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000576- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
577
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000578- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
579
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000580- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000581 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
582 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
583 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
584 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
585 accordingly.
586
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000587- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
588 decoding standards.
589
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000590- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
591 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
592 called for all requests.
593
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000594- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
595 they are passed to the compiler.
596
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000597- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
598 indent, width and depth.
599
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000600- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
601 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
602
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000603- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
604 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
605
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000606- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
607
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000608- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
609
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000610- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
611
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000612- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
613 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
614
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000615- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000616 for better performance.
617
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000618- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000619
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000620- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
621 a string).
622
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000623- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
624
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000625- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
626
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000627- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
628
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000629- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
630
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000631- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
632 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
633 list of fieldnames.
634
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000635- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
636 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
637
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000638- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
639
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000640- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
641 empty lists.
642
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000643- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
644 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
645 and shelves.
646
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000647- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
648 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
649
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000650- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000651 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
652 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000653
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000654- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
655 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000656 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000657
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000658- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000659 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
660 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
661
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000662- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
663 and removed in Py2.4.
664
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000665- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
666
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000667- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
668
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000669Tools/Demos
670-----------
671
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000672- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
673 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
674
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000675- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
676
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000677- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
678 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
679 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
680 destination in situations where both files are given.
681
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000682- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
683 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
684 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
685 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
686
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000687- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
688
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000689- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
690 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
691 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
692 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
693 now.
694
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000695- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
696 in effect
697
698- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
699 C-c C-h
700
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000701- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
702 -d option was given.
703
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000704Build
705-----
706
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000707- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
708 build under OS X.
709
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000710- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
711 --enable-profiling.
712
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000713- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
714 is configured --with-tsc.
715
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000716- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
717 on AMD64.
718
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000719- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
720 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
721
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000722- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
723 removed.
724
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000725- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
726 supported (see PEP 11).
727
728- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
729
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000730- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
731
732- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
733 (see PEP 11).
734
735- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
736 sizeof(char) must be 1.
737
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000738C API
739-----
740
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000741- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
742 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
743 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
744
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000745- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
746 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
747 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
748 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
749
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000750- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
751 generator objects.
752
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000753- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
754 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000755 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
756 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000757
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000758- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
759 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
760
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000761- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
762 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
763 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
764 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
765 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
766
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000767- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
768 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
769 about 10% faster.
770
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000771- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
772 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
773
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000774- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
775 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
776 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
777 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
778
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000779Windows
780-------
781
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000782- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
783 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
784 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
785 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
786
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000787- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
788 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
789 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
790
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000791
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000792What's New in Python 2.3 final?
793===============================
794
795*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
796
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000797IDLE
798----
799
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000800- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
801 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
802 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
803 context-menu actions.
804
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000805- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
806 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
807 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
808 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
809 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
810 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
811 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
812 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
813 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
814
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000815
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000816What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
817=============================================
818
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000819*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000820
821Core and builtins
822-----------------
823
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000824- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000825 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000826 comment at the end are still unsupported.
827
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000828Extension modules
829-----------------
830
831- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
832 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
833 than once. This has been fixed.
834
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000835- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
836 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
837 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
838 call.
839
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000840- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
841
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000842Library
843-------
844
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000845- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
846 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
847
848- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
849 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
850 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
851 restored.
852
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000853IDLE
854----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000855
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000856- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000857
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000858Build
859-----
860
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000861- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
862 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
863
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000864C API
865-----
866
867Windows
868-------
869
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000870- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
871 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
872
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000873- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
874
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000875Mac
876---
877
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000878- Various fixes to pimp.
879
880- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
881
882- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
883 more problems than it solves.
884
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000885
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000886What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
887=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000888
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000889*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
890
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000891Core and builtins
892-----------------
893
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000894- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
895 by sys.setcheckinterval().
896
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000897- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
898 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000899 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000900
901- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
902 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
903 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000904 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000905
906- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
907 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000908
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000909- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
910 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
911 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
912
913- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000914 770247.
915
916- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000917
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000918Extension modules
919-----------------
920
921- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
922 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
923
924- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
925
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000926- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
927
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000928- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
929 contained within the _strptime module.
930
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000931- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
932 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
933
934- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000935 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
936
937- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
938 the find_class attribute, if present.
939
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000940- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000941
942 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
943 (SF bug 763298).
944
945 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000946 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
947 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
948 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000949
950 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
951
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000952Library
953-------
954
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000955- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
956
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000957- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
958 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
959 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
960 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
961 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
962 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
963 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
964 or Tester().
965
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000966- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
967 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
968 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
969 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
970 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
971 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
972 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
973 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
974 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000975
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000976 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000977
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000978- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
979 weren't before was an oversight.
980
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000981- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
982 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
983
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000984- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
985 when there are no lines.
986
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000987- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
988 which could occur with Tk 8.4
989
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000990- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
991 to child processes.
992
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000993- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
994
995- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
996
997- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
998 xmlrpclib.
999
1000- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1001 responses.
1002
1003- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1004 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1005
1006- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1007 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1008 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1009
1010- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1011 used as patterns.
1012
1013- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1014 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1015 than Tk 8.3.
1016
1017- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1018
1019- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001020
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001021Tools/Demos
1022-----------
1023
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001024- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1025
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001026- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1027
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001028- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001029
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001030Build
1031-----
1032
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001033- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1034
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001035- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1036
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001037- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1038 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001039
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001040- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1041 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1042 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001043
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001044C API
1045-----
1046
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001047- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1048 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1049
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001050Windows
1051-------
1052
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001053- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1054 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1055 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1056 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1057 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1058 Python exception ::
1059
1060 thread.error: can't start new thread
1061
1062 is raised now.
1063
1064- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1065 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1066 instead of from DLL teardown.
1067
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001068Mac
1069---
1070
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001071- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001072 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001073 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1074 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1075 the executable in the bundle.
1076
1077- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001078
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001079- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1080
1081- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1082 on Panther.
1083
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001084What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1085================================
1086
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001087*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001088
1089Core and builtins
1090-----------------
1091
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001092- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1093 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1094 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1095 with the -i option.
1096
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001097- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1098 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1099
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001100- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1101 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1102
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001103- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1104 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1105 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1106 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1107 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1108 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1109 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1110 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1111 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1112 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1113 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1114 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1115 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001116
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001117- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1118 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1119 embedded in a lambda expression.
1120
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001121- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1122 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1123 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1124 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1125 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1126
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001127- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1128 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1129 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1130
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001131- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1132 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1133
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001134- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1135 It's writable again.
1136
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001137- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1138 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1139 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001140 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001141
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001142- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1143 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1144 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1145
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001146Extension modules
1147-----------------
1148
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001149- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1150 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1151
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001152- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1153 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1154 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1155 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1156
1157- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1158 collection.
1159
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001160- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1161 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1162 unique within a single program run.
1163
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001164- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1165 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1166
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001167- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1168 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1169
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001170- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1171 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001172
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001173- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1174
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001175- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1176 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1177
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001178- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1179 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1180 for many BSD-derived systems.
1181
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001182
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001183Library
1184-------
1185
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001186- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1187 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1188 primary ones:
1189
1190 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1191 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1192 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1193
1194 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1195 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1196 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1197 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1198 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1199 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1200
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001201- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1202 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1203 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1204 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1205 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1206 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1207 argument.
1208
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001209- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1210 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1211 in the archive.
1212
1213- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1214 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1215
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001216- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1217 569574).
1218
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001219- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1220 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1221 no more.
1222
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001223- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1224 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1225 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1226 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1227 code coverage.
1228
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001229- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1230 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1231 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001232 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1233 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001234
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001235- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1236 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1237 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001238 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001239
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001240- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1241
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001242- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1243 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1244 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1245 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1246
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001247- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1248 handling.
1249
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001250- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1251 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1252
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001253- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1254 in socket.py.
1255
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001256- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1257
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001258- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1259 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1260 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1261 opener with proxy support.
1262
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001263- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1264
1265- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1266
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001267Tools/Demos
1268-----------
1269
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001270- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1271
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001272- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1273
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001274- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1275 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001276
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001277- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1278 files.
1279
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001280Build
1281-----
1282
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001283- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001284 different root directory.
1285
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001286C API
1287-----
1288
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001289- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1290 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1291 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1292 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1293 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1294 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1295 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1296 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1297 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1298 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1299
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001300- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1301 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1302 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1303 from Python.
1304
1305
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001306New platforms
1307-------------
1308
1309None this time.
1310
1311Tests
1312-----
1313
1314- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1315 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1316
1317Windows
1318-------
1319
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001320- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1321
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001322- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1323 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1324 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1325 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1326 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1327 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1328 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1329 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1330 that's what it's for.
1331
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001332Mac
1333---
1334
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001335- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1336 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1337 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1338 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001339- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1340 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1341- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001342
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001343SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1344------------------------------------
1345
1346430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1347598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1348622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1349661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1350683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1351697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1352713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1353724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1354727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1355729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1356730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1357731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1358732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1359733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1360735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1361740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1362744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1363745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1364747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1365749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1366751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1367753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1368755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1369757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1370760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1371
1372
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001373What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1374================================
1375
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001376*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001377
1378Core and builtins
1379-----------------
1380
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001381- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1382 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1383
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001384- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1385 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1386 and cannot be strings).
1387
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001388- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1389 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1390 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1391 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1392
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001393- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1394 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1395 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1396 Python itself.
1397
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001398- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1399 the referenced object, if it has one.
1400
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001401- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1402 the thread started at
1403 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1404
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001405- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1406 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1407 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1408 placed on a list index.
1409
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001410- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1411 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1412 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1413 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1414
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001415- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1416 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1417 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1418 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1419 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1420 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1421 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1422
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001423- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1424 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1425 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1426 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1427 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1428
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001429- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1430 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001431
1432- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1433 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1434 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1435 #693195.)
1436
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001437- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1438 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001439
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001440- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001441 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001442 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1443 interpreter executions, would fail.
1444
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001445- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001446 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001447 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001448
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001449Extension modules
1450-----------------
1451
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001452- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1453 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1454 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1455 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1456
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001457- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1458 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1459
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001460- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1461 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1462 and Greg Chapman.)
1463
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001464- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1465 recursively.
1466
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001467- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001468 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1469 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1470 leaks.
1471
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001472- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1473
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001474- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1475 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1476 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1477 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1478 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1479 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1480 #705836.
1481
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001482- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001483 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1484
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001485- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1486 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1487 See SF bug #692416.
1488
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001489- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1490 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1491
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001492- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1493 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1494 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001495
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001496- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001497 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1498 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1499
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001500- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1501 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1502 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1503 timeouts to work properly.
1504
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001505Library
1506-------
1507
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001508- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1509 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1510 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1511 future release.
1512
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001513- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1514 for querying platform dependent features.
1515
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001516- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001517
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001518- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1519 pickle protocol versions.
1520
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001521- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1522 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1523 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1524
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001525- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1526
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001527- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1528 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1529 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1530 modules.
1531
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001532- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1533 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1534 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1535
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001536- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1537 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1538
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001539- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1540 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1541 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1542
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001543- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001544 MS Office extensions.
1545
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001546- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1547 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1548
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001549- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1550 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1551
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001552- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1553 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1554 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1555 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1556 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1557 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1558
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001559- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1560 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1561 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001562
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001563- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1564 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1565 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1566
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001567- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1568
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001569- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1570 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1571 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1572
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001573Tools/Demos
1574-----------
1575
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001576- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1577 See the module docstring for details.
1578
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001579Build
1580-----
1581
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001582- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1583 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001584
1585C API
1586-----
1587
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001588- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1589
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001590- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1591 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1592 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1593
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001594- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1595 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001596
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001597 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1598 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1599 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001600
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001601- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001602 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1603
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001604- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1605 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1606 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001607
1608New platforms
1609-------------
1610
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001611None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001612
1613Tests
1614-----
1615
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001616- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1617 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001618
1619Windows
1620-------
1621
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001622- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1623 function.
1624
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001625- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1626 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001627
1628Mac
1629---
1630
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001631- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1632 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001633
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001634- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1635 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001636
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001637- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1638 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1639 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001640
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001641- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001642 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1643 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001644
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001645- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1646 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001647
1648
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001649What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1650=================================
1651
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001652*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001653
1654Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001655-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001656
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001657- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1658 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1659 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1660
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001661- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1662 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1663 (SF patch #664376.)
1664
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001665- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1666 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1667 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1668 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1669 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1670 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001671 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001672
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001673- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1674 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1675 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1676 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001677 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001678
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001679- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1680 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1681 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1682 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1683 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1684 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1685 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1686 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1687 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1688 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1689 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1690
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001691- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1692 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1693 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1694 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1695 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1696 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1697
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001698- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1699 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1700
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001701- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1702 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1703 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1704 case.)
1705
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001706- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1707 passed as unicode strings.
1708
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001709- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1710 See SF bug #683467.
1711
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001712- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1713 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1714
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001715- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1716
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001717- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1718
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001719- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1720 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1721 arguments.
1722
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001723- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1724 See SF bug #667147.
1725
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001726- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001727 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001728 See SF bug #676155.
1729
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001730- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001731 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001732 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1733 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1734 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1735 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1736 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1737 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001738
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001739Extension modules
1740-----------------
1741
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001742- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1743 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1744 tp_as_number pointer.
1745
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001746- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1747 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1748 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1749 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1750 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1751
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001752- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1753
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001754- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1755
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001756- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001757 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001758 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1759 patch #678531.)
1760
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001761- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1762 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1763
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001764- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1765 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1766
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001767- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1768
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001769- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1770 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1771 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1772
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001773- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1774
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001775- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1776 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1777
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001778- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001779
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001780- datetime changes:
1781
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001782 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1783
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001784 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1785 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1786 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1787 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1788 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1789 now.
1790
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001791 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001792 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1793 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001794
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001795 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001796 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001797 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1798 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1799 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1800 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001801
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001802 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1803 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1804 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001805 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1806
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001807 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1808 by a later example coded by Guido.
1809
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001810 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001811 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1812 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1813 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001814 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1815 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1816
1817 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1818 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1819 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1820 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1821 tzinfo subclass instance.
1822
1823 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1824 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1825 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1826 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1827 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1828 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1829 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1830 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001831
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001832 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1833 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1834 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1835 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1836 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001837 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1838
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001839 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001840
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001841 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1842 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1843 as a naive datetime object.
1844
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001845 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1846 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1847 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1848
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001849 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1850 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1851 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1852 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1853 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1854 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1855 comparison.
1856
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001857 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1858 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1859 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1860 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001861 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001862
1863 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001864
1865 and ::
1866
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001867 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1868
1869 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1870 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1871 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1872 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1873
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001874 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1875 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1876 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1877 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1878 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1879
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001880 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1881 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001882 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1883 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001884
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001885Library
1886-------
1887
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001888- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1889 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1890
1891- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1892 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1893 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1894 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1895 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1896 See PEP 307 for details.
1897
1898- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1899 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1900
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001901- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1902 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001903 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001904 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1905 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001906 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001907
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001908- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1909 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1910
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001911- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1912 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1913 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1914
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001915- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1916
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001917- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1918 exception.
1919
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001920- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1921 class.
1922
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001923- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1924 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1925 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1926
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001927- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1928 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1929
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001930- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001931 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1932 See SF bug #659228.
1933
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001934- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1935 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1936 See SF patch #651082.
1937
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001938- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001939
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001940- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1941 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1942
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001943- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001944 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001945
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001946- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1947 DOS paths from other platforms.
1948
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001949Tools/Demos
1950-----------
1951
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001952- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1953 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1954 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1955 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1956 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1957 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1958 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1959 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1960 example:
1961
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001962 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1963 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001964
1965 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1966
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001967
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001968Build
1969-----
1970
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001971- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1972 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1973 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001974 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1975
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001976 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1977
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001978- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1979 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1980 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1981 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1982 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1983 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1984 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1985 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1986 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1987
1988- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1989 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1990 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1991 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1992
1993- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1994 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1995
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001996C API
1997-----
1998
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001999- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2000 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002001
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002002- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2003 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2004 tp_as_number pointer.
2005
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002006- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2007 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2008 (SF #681367)
2009
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002010- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2011 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2012 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2013 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002014
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002015Tests
2016-----
2017
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002018- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002019 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2020 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2021 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2022 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2023 pydoc.)
2024
2025- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2026
2027- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002028
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002029Windows
2030-------
2031
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002032- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2033 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2034 time).
2035
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002036- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2037 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2038
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002039- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2040 release without strong cryptography.
2041
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002042- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002043 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002044
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002045- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2046 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2047
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002048Mac
2049---
2050
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002051- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2052 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002053
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002054- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2055 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2056 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002057
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002058- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2059 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002060
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002061- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2062 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2063 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2064 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002065
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002066- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002067 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2068 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2069 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002070
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002071
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002072What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002073=================================
2074
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002075*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002076
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002077Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002078--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002079
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002080- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2081
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002082- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2083 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002084 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002085 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002086 a different meaning than before.
2087
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002088- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002089 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002090 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002091
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002092- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002093 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002094 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002095
2096- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2097 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2098 and deallocation.
2099
2100- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2101 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2102
2103- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2104 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2105 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2106 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2107 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2108
2109- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2110 now detected by the garbage collector.
2111
2112- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2113 [SF bug 519621]
2114
2115- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2116 identifier.
2117
2118- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2119 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2120 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2121 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2122 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2123 [SF bug 563060]
2124
2125- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2126 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2127 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2128 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2129 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2130
2131- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2132 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2133 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2134
2135- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2136
2137- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2138 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2139 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2140 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2141 state of the slots would be lost.)
2142
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002143Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002144-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002145
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002146- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002147 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2148 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2149 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2150 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002151 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2152 Jython 2.1.
2153
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002154- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002155 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002156 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2157 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2158 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2159 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2160 these, see PEP 302.
2161
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002162- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2163 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2164 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2165
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002166- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2167 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2168 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2169
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002170- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2171 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2172 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2173
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002174- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2175 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2176 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2177 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2178 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2179 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2180 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2181 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2182 releases or implementations.
2183
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002184- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002185 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2186 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002187
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002188- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2189 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2190
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002191- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2192 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2193 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2194
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002195- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2196 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2197
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002198- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2199 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002200 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2201 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002202
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002203- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2204 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2205 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2206 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2207 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2208
2209 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2210 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2211 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2212 pattern.
2213
2214 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2215 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2216 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2217 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2218
2219 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2220 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2221 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2222 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2223 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2224 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2225
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002226- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2227 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2228 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2229 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2230 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2231 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2232 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2233 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002234
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002235- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2236 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2237 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2238 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2239 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002240 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2241 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2242 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2243 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2244 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2245 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2246 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002247
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002248- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2249 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2250
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002251- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2252 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2253 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2254 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2255 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2256 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2257 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2258 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2259 to Zack Weinberg!
2260
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002261- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2262 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2263 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2264 type. This has been fixed now.
2265
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002266- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2267 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2268 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2269
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002270- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2271 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2272 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2273 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2274 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2275 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2276 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2277 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002278 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002279
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002280- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2281 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2282 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002283
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002284- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2285 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2286 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2287 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2288 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2289 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2290 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2291 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002292 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002293 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2294 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2295
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002296- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2297 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2298 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2299 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2300 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2301 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2302 this.)
2303
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002304- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2305 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002306 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002307 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002308 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2309 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002310 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2311 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002312
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002313- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2314 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2315 currently running.
2316
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002317- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2318 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2319 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2320 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2321
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002322- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2323 as directory names.
2324
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002325- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2326 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2327
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002328- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2329 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2330
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002331- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002332 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2333 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002334
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002335- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2336 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2337 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2338 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2339 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2340
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002341- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2342 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2343 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2344 removed.
2345
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002346- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2347 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2348 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2349
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002350- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2351 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2352 to __debug__.
2353
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002354- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2355 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2356 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2357
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002358- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2359 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2360 deprecated now.
2361
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002362- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2363 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2364 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002365
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002366- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2367 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2368 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2369 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2370 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002371
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002372- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2373 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2374
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002375- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2376 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2377 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002378 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002379 is backward compatible.
2380
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002381- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2382 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2383 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2384 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2385 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2386
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002387- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2388 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2389 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2390 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2391 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2392 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002393
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002394- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2395 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2396
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002397- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2398 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2399
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002400- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2401 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2402 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2403 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2404 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2405
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002406- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2407 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2408 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2409
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002410- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002411 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2412
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002413- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2414 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2415 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002416
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002417- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2418 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2419
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002420- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2421 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2422 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2423
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002424- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2425
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002426Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002427-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002428
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002429- Added three operators to the operator module:
2430 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2431 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2432 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2433
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002434- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2435
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002436- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2437 archives.
2438
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002439- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2440 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2441 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2442
2443 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2444
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002445- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2446 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2447 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002448 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002449
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002450- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2451 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2452 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2453 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002454 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2455 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2456 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2457 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002458
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002459- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2460 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002461
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002462- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2463
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002464- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2465 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2466
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002467- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2468 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2469 supported.
2470
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002471- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2472
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002473- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2474 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002475
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002476- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2477 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2478
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002479- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2480
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002481- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2482 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2483
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002484- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2485 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2486 functions but callable type objects.
2487
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002488- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002489 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002490 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002491
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002492- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2493 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002494
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002495- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2496 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002497
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002498- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2499 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2500 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2501 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2502
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002503- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2504 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002505
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002506- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2507 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2508 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2509 and __imul__.
2510
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002511- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002512 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2513 is called.
2514
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002515- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2516 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2517 interpreter was compiled.
2518
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002519- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2520 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2521 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002522 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002523 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2524 1, not 2.
2525
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002526- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2527 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2528 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2529 limit.
2530
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002531- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2532 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2533 bug #623464.
2534
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002535- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2536 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2537 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2538 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2539
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002540Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002541-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002542
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002543- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2544
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002545- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2546 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2547 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2548 with Python 2.3a2.
2549
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002550- os.path exposes getctime.
2551
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002552- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002553 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002554 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002555 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002556 unit tests of floating point results.
2557
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002558- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2559 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2560 has been increased.
2561
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002562- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2563 executed.
2564
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002565- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2566 postinstallation script.
2567
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002568- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2569 test the current module.
2570
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002571- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002572 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2573 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2574 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2575 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2576
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002577- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002578 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002579 Ward's Optik package.
2580
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002581- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2582 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2583 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2584 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2585
2586- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2587 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002588 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002589
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002590- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2591 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2592 shelf are binary pickles.
2593
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002594- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2595 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2596
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002597- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2598 modules are iterators now.
2599
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002600- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2601 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2602 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2603 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2604 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2605 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002606
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002607- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2608 with their entity value.
2609
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002610- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2611
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002612- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2613 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002614
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002615- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2616 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002617 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002618
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002619- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2620 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2621 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2622 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2623 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2624 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2625 main():
2626
2627 import locale
2628 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2629
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002630- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2631 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2632
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002633- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2634 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2635 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2636 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2637 to the new standard.
2638
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002639- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2640 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2641 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2642 an extension to the database.
2643
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002644- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2645 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2646 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2647 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002648 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002649
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002650- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002651 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002652
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002653- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2654 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2655 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2656 bounded integers.
2657
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002658- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2659 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2660 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2661 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2662 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2663 in existence.
2664
2665 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2666 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2667 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2668 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2669 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2670 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2671
2672 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2673 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2674 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2675 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2676
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002677- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2678 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2679 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2680
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002681- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2682
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002683- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2684 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2685 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2686 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2687
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002688- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2689 argument.
2690
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002691- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2692 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2693 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2694 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2695 [SF patch 560794].
2696
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002697- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2698 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2699 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002700 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2701 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2702 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002703
2704- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2705 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002706
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002707- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2708 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2709 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2710 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002711
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002712- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2713 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2714 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2715 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2716 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2717
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002718- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002719
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002720- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2721
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002722- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2723 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2724 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2725 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2726 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2727 identical to None.
2728
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002729- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2730 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2731 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2732 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2733 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2734 results now.
2735
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002736- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2737 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2738
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002739- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2740 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2741 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2742 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2743 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2744 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2745 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2746 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2747
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002748- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2749
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002750- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2751 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2752
2753- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2754 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2755 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2756 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2757 and other systems.
2758
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002759- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2760 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2761 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2762 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 +00002763 work well with these.
2764
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002765- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2766
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002767- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002768 connections.
2769
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002770- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2771 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2772 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2773
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002774- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2775 sets
2776
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002777- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2778 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2779 name.
2780
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002781- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2782 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2783 passed in.
2784
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002785- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002786 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002787 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2788 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002789
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002790- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2791
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002792- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2793
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002794- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2795 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2796 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2797
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002798- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2799 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2800 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2801 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002802 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002803
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002804- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002805 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002806 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002807
2808- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2809 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2810 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2811
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002812- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002813 the value of its expression argument.
2814
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002815- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2816 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2817 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2818
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002819- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2820 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2821 skipstone browser was included.
2822
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002823- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2824 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2825
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002826Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002827-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002828
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002829- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2830 names in addition to accepting file names.
2831
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002832- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2833 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2834 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2835 still used and useful.)
2836
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002837- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2838 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2839 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2840 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002841
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002842- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2843 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2844 the generated binary.
2845
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002846Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002847-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002848
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002849- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2850
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002851- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2852 except in the hands of experts.
2853
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002854- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002855 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2856 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2857 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002858
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002859- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2860 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2861 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2862 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2863 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2864 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2865 builds.
2866
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002867- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2868 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2869 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2870 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2871 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2872 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2873 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2874 new type.
2875
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002876- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002877
2878 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2879 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2880 positive infinities.
2881
2882 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2883 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2884 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2885 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2886 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2887 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2888 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2889
2890 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2891
2892 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2893
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002894- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2895 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2896 size of the executable.
2897
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002898- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2899 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2900 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2901 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002902
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002903- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2904
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002905- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2906 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2907 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002908
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002909- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2910 well as Unix.
2911
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002912- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2913 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2914 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2915 modules in the README file for details.
2916
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002917C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002918-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002919
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002920- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2921 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002922 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002923 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002924 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002925
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002926- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2927 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2928 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2929 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2930 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2931 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002932 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002933 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2934 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2935 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2936 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2937 aligned.)
2938
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002939- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2940 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2941 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2942
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002943- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2944 level.
2945
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002946- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2947 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2948 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2949 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2950 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2951
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002952- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2953 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2954 code.
2955
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002956- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2957 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2958 adjusting for negative indices.
2959
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002960- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2961 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2962 object.
2963
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002964- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2965 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2966 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2967
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002968- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2969 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002970
2971- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2972
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002973- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2974 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2975 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2976 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2977
2978- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2979
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002980- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002981
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002982- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002983 without going through the buffer API.
2984
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002985- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002986
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002987- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2988 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2989 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2990 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2991
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002992- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2993 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2994
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002995- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002996 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2997
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002998New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002999-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003000
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003001- OpenVMS is now supported.
3002
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003003- AtheOS is now supported.
3004
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003005- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3006
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003007- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3008
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003009Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003010-----
3011
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003012- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3013 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3014 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003015
3016Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003017-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003018
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003019- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3020 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3021 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3022 bugs.
3023 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003024 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003025 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3026 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003027 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003028
3029- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003030 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003031
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003032- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3033 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3034
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003035- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3036 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003037 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003038 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3039
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003040- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3041 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3042 use files" uninstall option).
3043
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003044- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3045
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003046- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3047 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3048
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003049- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3050 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3051 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3052
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003053- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3054 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3055 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3056 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3057 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003058 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3059 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3060 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003061
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003062- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003063 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003064 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3065 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3066 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3067 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3068 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3069 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3070 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3071 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3072 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3073 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3074 work around.
3075
3076- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3077 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3078 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3079 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3080 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3081 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3082 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3083 specified with O_CREAT too).
3084
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003085Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003086----
3087
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003088- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003089
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003090- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3091 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3092 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3093
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003094- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3095 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3096 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3097
3098- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3099 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3100 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3101 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3102 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3103 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3104 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3105 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003106
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003107- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3108 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3109 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003110
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003111- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3112 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3113 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3114 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3115 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003116
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003117- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3118 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3119 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003120
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003121- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3122 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003123
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003124- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3125 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3126 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3127 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3128 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003129
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003130- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3131 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3132 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3133
3134- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3135 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3136 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003137
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003138- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3139 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3140 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3141 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003142 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003143
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003144- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3145 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003146
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003147- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3148 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003149
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003150- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003151 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003152 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3153 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003154
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003155
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003156What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003157===============================
3158
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003159*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3160
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003161Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003162--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003163
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003164- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3165 with a custom metaclass.
3166
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003167Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003168-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003169
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003170- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3171 are proxies.
3172
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003173Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003174-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003175
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003176- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3177 very short strings.
3178
3179- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3180 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3181 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3182 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3183 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3184
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003185Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003186-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003187
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003188- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3189 close or delete time).
3190
3191- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3192 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3193
3194- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3195
3196- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003197 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003198
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003199Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003200-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003201
3202Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003203-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003204
3205C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003206-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003207
3208New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003209-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003210
3211Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003212-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003213
3214Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003215-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003216
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003217- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3218
3219- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3220 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3221
3222- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3223 deleted at process exit time.
3224
3225- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3226 in backslash.
3227
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003228Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003229----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003230
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003231- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3232 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3233 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3234
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003235
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003236What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003237===========================
3238
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003239*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3240
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003241Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003242--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003243
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003244- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3245 been extensively updated. See
3246
3247 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3248
3249 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3250
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003251- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3252 deleted!
3253
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003254- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3255 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3256 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3257 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3258 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3259
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003260- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3261
3262 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3263 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3264
3265 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3266 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3267 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3268 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3269 supported anyway.
3270
3271 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3272 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3273
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003274- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3275 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3276 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3277 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3278 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003279
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003280- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3281 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3282 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3283
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003284Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003285-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003286
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003287- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3288 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3289 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3290 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3291 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3292 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003293 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3294 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3295 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3296 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003297
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003298- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3299 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3300 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3301
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003302Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003303-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003304
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003305- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3306
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003307Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003308-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003309
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003310- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3311 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3312 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3313 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3314 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3315 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3316
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003317- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3318
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003319- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3320
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003321- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3322
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003323- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3324 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3325 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3326
3327- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3328
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003329Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003330-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003331
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003332- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3333 off a search on Google.
3334
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003335Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003336-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003337
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003338- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3339 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3340 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3341 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3342 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3343 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3344 other platforms should do likewise.
3345
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003346- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3347 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3348 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3349
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003350C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003351-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003352
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003353- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3354 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3355 producing key-value pairs.
3356
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003357- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003358 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003359 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3360 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3361 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3362 previously went unchallenged.
3363
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003364New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003365-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003366
3367Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003368-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003369
3370Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003371-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003372
3373Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003374----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003375
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003376- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3377 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003378
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003379- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3380 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3381 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3382 home.
3383
3384
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003385What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003386===========================
3387
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003388*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3389
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003390Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003391--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003392
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003393- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3394 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003395
3396 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003397 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003398
3399 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3400 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003401 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003402 This needs to be documented.
3403
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003404- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3405 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3406
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003407- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3408 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3409 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3410
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003411- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3412 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3413
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003414- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3415 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3416 class forbids it).
3417
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003418- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3419 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3420 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3421
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003422- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3423
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003424Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003425-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003426
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003427- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3428 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003429 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003430
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003431- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3432 (like 1 + '').
3433
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003434Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003435-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003436
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003437- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3438 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3439 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3440 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003441 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003442 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3443
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003444- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3445 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3446 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3447 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3448
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003449- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3450 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003451 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3452 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3453 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003454
3455- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3456 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003457
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003458- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3459 bytes on its input.
3460
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003461Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003462-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003463
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003464- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003465 convenience function.
3466
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003467- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3468 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3469 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003470 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3471 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3472 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3473 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3474 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3475 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003476
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003477- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3478 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3479 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3480 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3481
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003482- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3483 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3484 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3485
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003486- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3487 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3488 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3489 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3490
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003491- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3492 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003493 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003494 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3495 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3496 new -l and -e options.
3497
3498- statcache is now deprecated.
3499
3500- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3501 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003502 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003503 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3504 time properly taken into account.
3505
3506- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3507 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3508 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3509 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3510
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003511Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003512-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003513
3514Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003515-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003516
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003517- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3518 is built with libdb3 if available.
3519
3520- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3521
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003522C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003523-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003524
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003525- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3526 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3527 PySequence_Size().
3528
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003529- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3530
3531- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3532 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3533 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3534
3535- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3536 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3537
3538- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3539 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3540
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003541New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003542-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003543
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003544- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3545 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3546
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003547- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3548 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3549
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003550- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3551
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003552Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003553-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003554
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003555- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3556 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3557
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003558Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003559-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003560
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003561Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003562----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003563
3564- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3565 removed completely in the next release.
3566
3567- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3568 OSX.
3569
3570- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3571 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3572
3573- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3574
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003575
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003576What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003577===========================
3578
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003579*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3580
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003581Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003582--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003583
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003584- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003585 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003586 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003587 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3588 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003589 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3590 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003591 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3592 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003593
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003594- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3595 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3596
3597- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3598 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3599
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003600Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003601-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003602
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003603- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3604 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3605 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3606 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3607 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3608 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3609 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3610 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3611
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003612- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3613 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3614 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3615 example).
3616
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003617- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003618 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003619 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003620 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003621
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003622- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3623 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3624 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003625 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003626
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003627- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3628 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3629 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3630 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3631 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3632 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3633
3634 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3635
3636 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3637
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003638Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003639-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003640
3641- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3642
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003643- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3644
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003645- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3646 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003647
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003648- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3649 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3650 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3651 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3652 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3653 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003654 attributes.
3655
3656- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3657 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3658 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003659
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003660- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3661 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3662 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003663
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003664- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3665 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3666 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003667 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3668 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3669
3670- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3671 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003672
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003673Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003674-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003675
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003676- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3677 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3678
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003679- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3680 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3681 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3682 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3683
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003684- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3685 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3686 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3687 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3688
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003689 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3690 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3691 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3692 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3693 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3694 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3695 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3696 without losing information).
3697
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003698- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003699 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3700 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3701 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3702 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3703 module).
3704
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003705 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003706 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3707 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3708 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3709 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003710
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003711- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003712 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3713 encoding.
3714
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003715- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3716 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3717
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003718- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003719 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3720
3721- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3722 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3723 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3724 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3725
3726- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3727
3728- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3729 ON, and OFF.
3730
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003731- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3732 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3733
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003734Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003735-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003736
3737- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3738 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3739 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003740
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003741- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3742 been added: -X and -E.
3743
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003744Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003745-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003746
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003747- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3748 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3749
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003750C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003751-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003752
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003753- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3754 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3755 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3756 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3757 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3758
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003759- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3760 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3761 as long) arguments.
3762
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003763- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3764 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3765 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3766 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3767 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3768 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3769
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003770- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3771 input.
3772
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003773New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003774-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003775
3776Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003777-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003778
3779Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003780-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003781
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003782- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3783 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3784 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3785
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003786- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3787 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3788 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003789 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003790
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003791 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3792 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3793 import signal
3794 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003795
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003796 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003797 while 1:
3798 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003799 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003800 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3801 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3802 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3803 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003804
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003805
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003806What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3807===========================
3808
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003809*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3810
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003811Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003812--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003813
3814- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3815 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3816 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3817
3818- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3819 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3820 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3821 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3822 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3823 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3824 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003825
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003826- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003827 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003828 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3829 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3830 associate a docstring with a property.
3831
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003832- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3833 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3834 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3835 other built-in object types.
3836
3837- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3838 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3839 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3840 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3841 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3842
3843- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3844 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3845
3846- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3847 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003848 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003849 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3850 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3851 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3852 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3853 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3854
3855- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3856 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3857 class.
3858
3859- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3860 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3861 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3862 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3863
3864- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3865 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3866 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3867 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3868
3869- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3870 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3871
3872- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3873 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3874 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3875 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3876 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003877 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003878 with the same value as s.
3879
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003880- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3881
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003882Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003883----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003884
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003885- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3886
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003887- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3888 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3889 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3890 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3891 objects.
3892
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003893- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3894 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003895 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3896 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3897
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003898- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3899 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3900 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3901
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003902Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003903-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003904
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003905- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3906 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3907 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3908 by the instances.
3909
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003910- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3911 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3912 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3913
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003914- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3915 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3916 before the entire comparison is complete.
3917
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003918- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3919 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3920 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3921
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003922- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3923 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3924 getwriter().
3925
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003926- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3927 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3928
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003929- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003930 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3931 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3932
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003933- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3934 iterable object.
3935
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003936- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3937 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003938
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003939- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3940 authentication.
3941
3942- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3943 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003944
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003945- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003946 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3947 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3948 a sample driver.)
3949
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003950Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003951-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003952
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003953- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3954 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3955 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3956 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3957 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3958 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3959 kernel has large file support.
3960
3961- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3962 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3963 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3964 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3965 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3966
3967- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3968 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3969 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3970
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003971C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003972-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003973
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003974- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3975 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3976
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003977New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003978-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003979
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003980- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3981 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3982
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003983Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003984-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003985
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003986- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3987 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3988 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3989 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3990 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3991
3992- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3993 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3994 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3995 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3996
3997- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3998 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3999
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004000Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004001-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004002
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004003- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004004 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4005 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004006
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004007
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004008What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4009===========================
4010
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004011*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4012
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004013Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004014----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004015
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004016- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4017 big to represent as a C double.
4018
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004019- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4020 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4021 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4022 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4023 restriction).
4024
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004025- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4026 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4027 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4028 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4029 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4030
4031 >>> dir([])
4032 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4033 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4034 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4035 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4036 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4037 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4038 'reverse', 'sort']
4039
4040 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4041
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004042- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004043 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4044 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4045 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4046 OverflowError exception.
4047
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004048- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004049 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004050 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4051 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4052 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4053 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4054 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004055 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004056 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4057 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4058
4059 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4060 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4061 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4062 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004063
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004064- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004065 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4066 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4067 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4068 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4069 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4070 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4071 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4072 once it is created.
4073
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004074- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4075 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4076 (key, value) pairs.
4077
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004078- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004079 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4080 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4081
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004082- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4083 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4084 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4085 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4086 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004087
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004088- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004089 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4090 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4091
4092 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4093
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004094- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004095 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4096
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004097Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004098-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004099
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004100- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004101 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4102 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004103
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004104- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4105 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4106 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4107 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4108 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4109 in this area anymore).
4110
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004111- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4112 threading.Timer.
4113
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004114- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4115 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4116
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004117- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004118 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4119
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004120- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004121 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4122 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4123 converted to Python longs.
4124
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004125- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004126 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4127
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004128- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4129 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4130 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4131
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004132Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004133-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004134
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004135- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4136 division operators as per PEP 238.
4137
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004138Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004139-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004140
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004141- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4142 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4143 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4144 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4145
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004146C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004147-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004148
4149- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004150
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004151- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4152 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004153 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004154
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004155 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4156 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004157 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004158 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004159
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004160- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004161 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4162 module:
4163
4164 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004165
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004166 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4167 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004168
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004169 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4170 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004171
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004172 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4173
4174 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4175
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004176- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004177 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4178 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4179 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004180
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004181New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004182-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004183
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004184- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4185 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4186 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4187 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4188 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004189
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004190Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004191-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004192
4193Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004194-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004195
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004196- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4197 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4198 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4199 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004200 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4201 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4202 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4203 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4204 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004205
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004206- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004207 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4208
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004209
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004210What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4211===========================
4212
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004213*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4214
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004215Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004216-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004217
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004218- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4219 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4220
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004221- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4222 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4223 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004224
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004225- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4226 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4227 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4228 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004229
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004230- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4231
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004232- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004233
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004234Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004235-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004236
4237- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004238 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004239 the module docstring for details.
4240
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004241Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004242-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004243
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004244- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004245 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4246 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4247 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004248
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004249- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4250 Nick Mathewson.
4251
4252Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004253----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004254
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004255- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4256 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4257 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4258 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4259 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4260 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4261 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4262 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4263
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004264- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4265 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4266 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4267 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4268
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004269- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4270 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4271 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4272 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4273 come a long way).
4274
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004275- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4276 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4277 write filters for these warnings).
4278
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004279- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4280 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4281 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4282 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4283 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4284
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004285- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4286 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4287 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4288 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4289 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4290 older distribution.
4291
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004292Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004293-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004294
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004295- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4296 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004297 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004298
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004299- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4300 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4301 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4302
4303- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4304
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004305- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4306
4307- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4308
4309- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4310
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004311- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004312
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004313- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4314
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004315New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004316-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004317
4318C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004319-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004320
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004321- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4322 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4323 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4324 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4325 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4326 against buffer overruns.
4327
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004328- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004329 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4330 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004331 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4332 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4333 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4334
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004335- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4336 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4337 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4338 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4339 deprecated.
4340
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004341Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004342-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004343
4344- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4345 relevant is found.
4346
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004347
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004348What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004349===========================
4350
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004351*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4352
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004353Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004354----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004355
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004356- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4357 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4358 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4359 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4360 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4361 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4362 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4363 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004364 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004365 repaired.
4366
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004367- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004368 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004369 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4370 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4371 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4372 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4373 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4374 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4375 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4376 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4377
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004378- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4379 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4380 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4381 leading BMO character).
4382
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004383- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4384 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4385 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4386
4387 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4388 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4389 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004390
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004391 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4392 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4393 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4394 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4395 for various simple to use conversions.
4396
4397 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4398 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4399
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004400 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4401 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4402 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4403 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4404 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4405 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4406 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4407 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4408 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4409 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4410 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4411 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4412 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4413 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4414 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004415
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004416- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4417 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4418 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004419 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004420 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004421
4422 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004423 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4424 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4425 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4426 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4427 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004428 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4429 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004430
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004431 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4432 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4433 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004434 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004435
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004436- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4437 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4438 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4439 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4440 floating arithmetic,
4441
4442 x = 9007199254740992.0
4443 print long(x)
4444
4445 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4446 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4447 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4448 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4449 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4450 functions are of good quality).
4451
4452 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4453 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4454 algorithms to break.
4455
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004456- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4457 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4458 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4459 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4460 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4461 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4462 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4463 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4464 order.
4465
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004466- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4467 operation along the most common code paths.
4468
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004469- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4470 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4471
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004472- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4473 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4474 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4475 {}.update(UserDict())
4476
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004477- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4478 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4479 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4480 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4481 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4482 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4483 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4484 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4485
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004486- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004487 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004488
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004489 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004490 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4491 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004492 join() method of strings
4493 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004494 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4495 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004496 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004497 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004498
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004499- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4500 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4501
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004502- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4503 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4504
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004505- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4506 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4507 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4508 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4509
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004510- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4511 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004512 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004513 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4514 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004515
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004516- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4517
4518
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004519Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004520-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004521
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004522- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004523 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004524 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4525 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4526
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004527- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4528 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4529
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004530- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4531 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4532 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4533 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4534
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004535- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4536 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4537 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4538
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004539- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4540
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004541- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4542
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004543- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4544 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4545 that are still imported into string.py).
4546
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004547- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4548
4549- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4550 Now it does.
4551
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004552- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4553
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004554- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4555 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4556 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4557 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4558 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004559 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4560 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004561
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004562- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4563 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4564 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4565 'help(object)'.
4566
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004567Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004568-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004569
4570- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004571 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004572 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4573 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4574
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004575- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004576 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4577 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004578
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004579C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004580-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004581
4582- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4583 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004584
4585----
4586
4587**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**