blob: af04ecf4e81df1da0c9e08497f738f03e4634080 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000013- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
14 list.sort().
15
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000016
17Extension Modules
18-----------------
19
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000020- array.array objects are now picklable.
21
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000022- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
23 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
24
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000025- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
26 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
27 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
28
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000029
30Library
31-------
32
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +000033- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
34 (Bug #951915).
35
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +000036- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
37 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
38 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
39 encoding alias table
40
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +000041- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
42
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000043- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
44 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
45
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +000046- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
47
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +000048- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
49
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +000050- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
51
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +000052- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
53
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +000054- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
55
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +000056- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
57 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
58 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
59
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000060- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000061 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000062
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +000063- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
64 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
65 tokenizer with very long source lines.
66
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +000067- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
68 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
69
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000070
71Build
72-----
73
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +000074- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
75 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
76 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
77 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
78 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
79 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
80 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
81 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
82
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000083
84C API
85-----
86
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +000087- Removed PyRange_New().
88
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000089
90Tests
91-----
92
93
94Mac
95---
96
97
98
99Tools/Demos
100-----------
101
102
103
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000104What's New in Python 2.4 final?
105===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000106
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000107*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000108
109Core and builtins
110-----------------
111
112- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
113 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
114 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
115
116
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000117What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
118==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000119
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000120*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000121
122Core and builtins
123-----------------
124
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000125- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
126 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
127 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
128
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000129
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000130Library
131-------
132
133- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
134 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
135 raised is re-raised.
136
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000137- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
138 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
139
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000140- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
141 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
142 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
143 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
144 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
145 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
146 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
147 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
148 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
149 by the slice are recomputed now.
150
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000151- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000152
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000153Build
154-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000155
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000156- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
157 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
158 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000159
160C API
161-----
162
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000163- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
164
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000165
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000166What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
167================================
168
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000169*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000170
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000171License
172-------
173
174The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
175is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
176changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
177Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
178intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
179durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
180the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
181License::
182
183 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
184
185says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
186to Python 2.1.1.
187
188The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
189License Version 2.
190
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000191Core and builtins
192-----------------
193
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000194- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
195 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
196 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
197 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
198 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
199 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
200 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
201 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
202 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
203 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
204
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000205- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000206
207Extension Modules
208-----------------
209
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000210- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
211 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
212 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
213 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000214
215Library
216-------
217
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000218- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
219 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
220 returned.
221
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000222- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
223
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000224- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
225 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
226
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000227- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
228
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000229- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
230 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000231
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000232- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
233
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000234- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
235
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000236- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000237 the source code is updated and reloaded.
238
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000239Build
240-----
241
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000242- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000243
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000244What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
245================================
246
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000247*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000248
249Core and builtins
250-----------------
251
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000252- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000253 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
254
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000255- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
256 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
257 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
258 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
259
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000260- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
261 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
262
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000263- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
264 constant.
265
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000266- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
267 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
268 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
269 large), and to anomalies such as
270 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
271 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
272 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
273 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000274
275Extension modules
276-----------------
277
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000278- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
279 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000280 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
281 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
282 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000283
284Library
285-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000286
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000287- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000288 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000289 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
290 --swig-cpp.
291
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000292- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
293 it is set.
294
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000295- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000296
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000297- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
298 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
299 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
300 Closes bug #1039270.
301
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000302- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000303
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000304 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000305 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
306 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
307 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
308 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
309 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
310 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
311 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
312 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
313 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
314 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
315 + Updates to documentation.
316
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000317- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
318 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
319 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
320 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
321
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000322- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000323
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000324- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
325 applications should use the getmember function.
326
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000327- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
328
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000329- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
330 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
331 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
332 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
333 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
334 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
335 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
336 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
337 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
338
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000339- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
340 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000341 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000342
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000343- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
344 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
345 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
346 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
347 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
348 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
349 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
350 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000351
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000352- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
353 the new public features (of which there are many).
354
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000355- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000356 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
357 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
358 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
359 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000360 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000361
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000362- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
363
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000364- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
365 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
366 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
367 options.
368
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000369- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
370 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
371 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
372 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
373 conditions under which non-string values work.
374
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000375Build
376-----
377
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000378- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
379 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
380 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
381
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000382- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
383 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
384 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
385 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
386 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000387
388C API
389-----
390
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000391- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
392 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
393
394- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
395
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000396- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
397 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
398 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
399 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
400 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
401 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
402 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
403 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
404 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
405
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000406- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
407
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000408- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
409 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
410 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000411
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000412Tests
413-----
414
415- test__locale ported to unittest
416
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000417Mac
418---
419
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000420- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
421 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
422 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000423
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000424Tools/Demos
425-----------
426
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000427- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
428 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
429 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
430 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
431 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000432
433
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000434What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
435=================================
436
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000437*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000438
439Core and builtins
440-----------------
441
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000442- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000443 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
444
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000445- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
446 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
447 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
448 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
449 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
450 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
451 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
452 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000453 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
454 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
455 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
456 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
457 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000458
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000459- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
460 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
461 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
462 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
463 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
464
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000465- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
466
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000467- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
468 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
469
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000470- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
471 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
472 modified the list.
473
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000474- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
475 functions is now writable.
476
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000477- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
478 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
479 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
480 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
481
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000482- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
483 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
484 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
485 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
486 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000487
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000488- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
489 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
490
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000491Extension modules
492-----------------
493
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000494- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
495
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000496- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
497 data.
498
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000499- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
500 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
501 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
502 supposed to have been truncated away.
503
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000504- Added socket.socketpair().
505
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000506- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
507 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
508
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000509- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000510 versions of Python, have now been removed.
511
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000512Library
513-------
514
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000515- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000516 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000517
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000518- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
519 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
520
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000521- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
522 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
523
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000524- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
525
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000526- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
527 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000528
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000529- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
530 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
531
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000532- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
533
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000534- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
535
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000536- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
537
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000538- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
539 Percivall.
540
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000541- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
542 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
543
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000544- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
545 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
546 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000547 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000548
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000549- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
550 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
551 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
552 and exponent.
553
554- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
555
556- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
557 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
558 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
559
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000560- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
561 to the readline module.
562
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000563- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000564 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
565 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000566
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000567- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
568 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
569 contains symlinks.
570
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000571- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
572 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
573
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000574- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
575 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
576 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
577
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000578- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
579 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
580 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
581 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
582 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
583 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
584 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
585 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
586 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
587 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
588 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
589 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
590 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
591
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000592- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
593
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000594Tools/Demos
595-----------
596
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000597- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
598 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
599
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000600- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
601
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000602Build
603-----
604
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000605- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
606 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
607 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
608 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
609 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
610 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
611 plans to do so.
612
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000613- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
614 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
615
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000616- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
617 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
618
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000619- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
620 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
621
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000622- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
623 GNU/k*BSD systems.
624
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000625- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
626 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
627
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000628C API
629-----
630
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000631..
632
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000633Documentation
634-------------
635
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000636- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
637 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
638
639- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
640 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
641 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000642
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000643New platforms
644-------------
645
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000646- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
647
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000648Tests
649-----
650
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000651..
652
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000653Windows
654-------
655
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000656- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
657 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
658 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
659 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
660 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
661 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
662 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
663 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
664 the problem.
665
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000666Mac
667---
668
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000669..
670
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000671
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000672What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
673=================================
674
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000675*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000676
677Core and builtins
678-----------------
679
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000680- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
681 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
682 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
683 sensitive code.
684
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000685- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000686 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000687
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000688 @staticmethod
689 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000690
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000691 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000692
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000693- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
694 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
695 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
696 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
697 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
698 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
699 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
700 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
701 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
702 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
703 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
704
705 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
706 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
707 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
708 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
709 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
710 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
711 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
712
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000713- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
714 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
715
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000716- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000717 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000718
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000719- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000720 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000721 which was missing for no apparent reason.
722
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000723- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000724 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
725 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
726
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000727- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
728 types that support garbage collection.
729
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000730- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
731
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000732- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
733 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
734 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
735 Jython.
736
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000737- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
738
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000739- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
740 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
741
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000742- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
743 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
744 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000745
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000746- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
747 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
748 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
749
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000750Extension modules
751-----------------
752
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000753- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
754
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000755Library
756-------
757
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000758- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
759 TIS-620
760
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000761- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
762 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
763 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
764 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
765 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
766 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
767 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
768 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
769 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
770 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
771
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000772- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
773
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000774- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
775 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
776 same as when the argument is omitted).
777 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
778
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000779- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
780
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000781- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
782 schemes are offered.
783
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000784- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
785
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000786- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
787 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
788 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
789
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000790- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
791
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000792- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
793 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
794
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000795- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
796 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
797 when dummy_threading is being used.
798
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000799- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
800 from a tarfile.
801
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000802- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000803 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000804
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000805- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
806 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
807 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
808 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
809
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000810- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
811 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
812
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000813- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
814 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
815 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
816 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
817 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
818 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
819 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
820 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
821 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
822 by some other method in progress).
823
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000824- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
825 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
826 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000827
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000828- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
829
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000830- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
831 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
832 AM Kuchling.
833
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000834- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
835 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
836 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
837
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000838- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
839 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
840 instead of unsigned.
841
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000842- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000843 no longer part of the public API.
844
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000845- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
846 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
847 string methods of the same name).
848
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000849- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000850 SF patch 945642.
851
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000852- doctest unittest integration improvements:
853
854 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
855
856 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
857 DocTestSuites.
858
859- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
860 that provide thread-local data.
861
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000862- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
863 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
864
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000865- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
866
867- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
868 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
869 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
870
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000871- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
872
873 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
874 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
875 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000876
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000877 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
878 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
879 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
880 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
881
882 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
883 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
884
885 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
886 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
887 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
888 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
889
890 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
891 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
892 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
893 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
894 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
895
896 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
897 wrapping help output.
898
899 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
900 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
901 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000902
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000903C API
904-----
905
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000906- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
907 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
908 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
909 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
910 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
911 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
912 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
913 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
914 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
915 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
916 its visible semantics have not changed.
917
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000918- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
919 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
920
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000921Documentation
922-------------
923
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000924- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000925
926 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000927 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000928
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000929 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000930
931 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
932
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000933- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000934
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000935Tests
936-----
937
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000938- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000939 platforms that use the Makefile.
940
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000941- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
942 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
943 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
944
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000945
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000946What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
947=================================
948
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000949*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000950
951Core and builtins
952-----------------
953
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000954- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
955 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
956 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
957 objects now (one object instead of three).
958
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000959- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
960 Windows DLLs.
961
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000962- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
963 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000964
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000965- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
966 a new .pyc magic.
967
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000968- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
969 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
970 be there.
971
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000972- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
973 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
974 the LC_NUMERIC category.
975
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000976- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
977 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
978 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
979
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000980- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
981
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000982- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
983 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
984 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000985
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000986- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
987 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
988
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000989- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
990
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000991- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000992 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000993
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000994- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
995
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000996- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
997
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000998- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
999 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1000
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001001- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1002 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1003 Fixes bug #858016 .
1004
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001005- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1006 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1007 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1008
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001009- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1010 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1011 improves their performance (about 35%).
1012
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001013- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1014 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1015 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1016
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001017- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1018 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1019 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1020 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1021
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001022- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1023 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1024 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1025 length is not known).
1026
1027- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1028 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001029 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1030 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001031 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1032
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001033- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1034 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1035
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001036- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1037 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1038 keyword arguments.
1039
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001040- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1041 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1042 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1043
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001044- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1045 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1046 cases.
1047
1048- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1049 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1050 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1051 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1052 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1053 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1054 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1055 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1056 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1057 a release build.
1058
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001059- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1060 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1061
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001062- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001063 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001064
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001065- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1066 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1067 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1068 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1069 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1070 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1071 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1072 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1073 destroyed.
1074
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001075- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1076 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1077 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1078 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1079 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1080 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1081 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1082 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1083
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001084- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1085 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1086 character other than a space.
1087
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001088- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1089 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1090 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1091 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1092 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1093 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1094 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1095 attributes with the same name.
1096
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001097- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1098 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1099 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1100 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1101 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1102 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1103 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1104 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1105 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1106 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1107 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1108 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1109 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1110 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001111
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001112- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1113 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1114 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1115 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1116 This has been repaired.
1117
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001118- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1119
1120- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1121
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001122- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1123 over a sequence.
1124
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001125- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001126 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001127
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001128- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1129
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001130- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1131 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1132 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1133 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1134 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1135 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1136 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1137 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1138
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001139- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1140 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1141 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1142
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001143- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1144 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1145 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1146 freelist.
1147
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001148- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1149 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1150
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001151- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1152 number.
1153
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001154- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1155 a TypeError exception.
1156
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001157- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1158 820195.
1159
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001160- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1161 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1162 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1163
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001164- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001165 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1166 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001167
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001168- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1169 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1170 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1171
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001172- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1173 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001174 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001175
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001176- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001177 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1178 the first call.
1179
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001180
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001181Extension modules
1182-----------------
1183
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001184- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1185 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1186
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001187- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1188 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1189 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1190 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1191 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1192 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1193 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001194
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001195- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1196
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001197- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1198
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001199- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1200 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1201
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001202- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1203 fewer false positives.
1204
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001205- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1206 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1207
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001208- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001209 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1210
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001211- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001212 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001213 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001214 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1215 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001216
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001217- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1218 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1219 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1220 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1221
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001222- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1223 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1224 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1225 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1226 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1227 #897625.
1228
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001229- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1230 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1231
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001232- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1233 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1234 and pops on either side of the deque.
1235
1236- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1237 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1238
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001239- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1240 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1241 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1242 other functions that expect a function argument.
1243
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001244- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1245
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001246- os.getsid was added.
1247
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001248- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1249 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1250 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1251
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001252- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1253
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001254- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1255
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001256- readline.clear_history was added.
1257
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001258- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1259
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001260- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1261
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001262- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1263
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001264- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1265
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001266- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1267
1268- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1269
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001270- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1271
1272- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1273
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001274- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1275 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1276 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1277
1278- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1279 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1280 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1281 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1282 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1283 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1284 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1285
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001286- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1287 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1288 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1289 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001290
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001291- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001292 iterators from a single iterable.
1293
1294- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1295 of raising a TypeError exception.
1296
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001297- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1298 as parameter.
1299
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001300Library
1301-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001302
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001303- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1304 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1305 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001306
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001307- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1308 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1309 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001310
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001311- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001312
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001313- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1314 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001315
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001316- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1317 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1318
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001319- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1320
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001321- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001322 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001323
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001324- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001325 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001326
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001327- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1328
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001329- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1330 on cygwin and mingw32.
1331
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001332- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1333
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001334- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1335 module.
1336
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001337- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1338 installation scheme for all platforms.
1339
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001340- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001341 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001342
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001343- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1344 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1345 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1346
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001347- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1348 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1349 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1350
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001351- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1352
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001353- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1354
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001355- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1356 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1357
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001358- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1359 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1360 type pattern with the same value exists.
1361
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001362- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1363 when run from the command prompt).
1364
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001365- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1366 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1367
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001368- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1369 default sort).
1370
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001371- Added global runctx function to profile module
1372
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001373- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1374
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001375- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1376
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001377- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1378
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001379- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001380 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1381 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1382 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1383 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1384 accordingly.
1385
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001386- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1387 decoding standards.
1388
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001389- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1390 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1391 called for all requests.
1392
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001393- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1394 they are passed to the compiler.
1395
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001396- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1397 indent, width and depth.
1398
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001399- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1400 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1401
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001402- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1403 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1404
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001405- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1406
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001407- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1408
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001409- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1410
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001411- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1412 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1413
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001414- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001415 for better performance.
1416
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001417- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001418
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001419- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1420 a string).
1421
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001422- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1423
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001424- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1425
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001426- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1427
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001428- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1429
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001430- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1431 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1432 list of fieldnames.
1433
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001434- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1435 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1436
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001437- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1438
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001439- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1440 empty lists.
1441
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001442- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1443 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1444 and shelves.
1445
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001446- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1447 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1448
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001449- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001450 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1451 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001452
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001453- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1454 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001455 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001456
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001457- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001458 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1459 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1460
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001461- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1462 and removed in Py2.4.
1463
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001464- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1465
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001466- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1467
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001468Tools/Demos
1469-----------
1470
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001471- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1472 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1473
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001474- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1475
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001476- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1477 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1478 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1479 destination in situations where both files are given.
1480
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001481- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1482 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1483 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1484 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1485
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001486- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1487
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001488- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1489 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1490 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1491 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1492 now.
1493
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001494- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1495 in effect
1496
1497- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1498 C-c C-h
1499
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001500- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1501 -d option was given.
1502
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001503Build
1504-----
1505
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001506- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1507 build under OS X.
1508
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001509- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1510 --enable-profiling.
1511
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001512- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1513 is configured --with-tsc.
1514
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001515- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1516 on AMD64.
1517
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001518- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1519 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1520
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001521- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1522 removed.
1523
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001524- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1525 supported (see PEP 11).
1526
1527- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1528
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001529- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1530
1531- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1532 (see PEP 11).
1533
1534- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1535 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1536
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001537C API
1538-----
1539
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001540- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1541 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1542 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1543
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001544- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1545 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1546 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1547 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1548
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001549- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1550 generator objects.
1551
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001552- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1553 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001554 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1555 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001556
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001557- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1558 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1559
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001560- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1561 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1562 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1563 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1564 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1565
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001566- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1567 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1568 about 10% faster.
1569
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001570- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1571 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1572
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001573- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1574 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1575 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1576 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1577
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001578Windows
1579-------
1580
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001581- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1582 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1583 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1584 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1585
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001586- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1587 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1588 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1589
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001590
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001591What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1592===============================
1593
1594*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1595
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001596IDLE
1597----
1598
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001599- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1600 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1601 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1602 context-menu actions.
1603
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001604- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1605 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1606 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1607 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1608 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1609 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1610 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1611 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1612 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1613
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001614
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001615What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1616=============================================
1617
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001618*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001619
1620Core and builtins
1621-----------------
1622
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001623- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001624 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001625 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1626
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001627Extension modules
1628-----------------
1629
1630- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1631 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1632 than once. This has been fixed.
1633
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001634- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1635 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1636 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1637 call.
1638
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001639- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1640
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001641Library
1642-------
1643
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001644- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1645 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1646
1647- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1648 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1649 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1650 restored.
1651
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001652IDLE
1653----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001654
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001655- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001656
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001657Build
1658-----
1659
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001660- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1661 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1662
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001663C API
1664-----
1665
1666Windows
1667-------
1668
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001669- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1670 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1671
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001672- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1673
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001674Mac
1675---
1676
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001677- Various fixes to pimp.
1678
1679- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1680
1681- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1682 more problems than it solves.
1683
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001684
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001685What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1686=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001687
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001688*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1689
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001690Core and builtins
1691-----------------
1692
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001693- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1694 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1695
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001696- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1697 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001698 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001699
1700- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1701 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1702 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001703 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001704
1705- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1706 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001707
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001708- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1709 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1710 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1711
1712- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001713 770247.
1714
1715- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001716
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001717Extension modules
1718-----------------
1719
1720- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1721 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1722
1723- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1724
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001725- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1726
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001727- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1728 contained within the _strptime module.
1729
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001730- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1731 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1732
1733- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001734 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1735
1736- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1737 the find_class attribute, if present.
1738
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001739- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001740
1741 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1742 (SF bug 763298).
1743
1744 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001745 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1746 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1747 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001748
1749 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1750
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001751Library
1752-------
1753
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001754- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1755
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001756- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1757 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1758 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1759 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1760 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1761 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1762 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1763 or Tester().
1764
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001765- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1766 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1767 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1768 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1769 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1770 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1771 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1772 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1773 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001774
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001775 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001776
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001777- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1778 weren't before was an oversight.
1779
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001780- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1781 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1782
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001783- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1784 when there are no lines.
1785
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001786- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1787 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1788
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001789- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1790 to child processes.
1791
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001792- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1793
1794- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1795
1796- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1797 xmlrpclib.
1798
1799- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1800 responses.
1801
1802- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1803 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1804
1805- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1806 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1807 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1808
1809- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1810 used as patterns.
1811
1812- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1813 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1814 than Tk 8.3.
1815
1816- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1817
1818- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001819
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001820Tools/Demos
1821-----------
1822
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001823- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1824
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001825- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1826
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001827- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001828
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001829Build
1830-----
1831
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001832- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1833
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001834- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1835
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001836- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1837 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001838
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001839- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1840 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1841 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001842
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001843C API
1844-----
1845
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001846- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1847 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1848
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001849Windows
1850-------
1851
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001852- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1853 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1854 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1855 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1856 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1857 Python exception ::
1858
1859 thread.error: can't start new thread
1860
1861 is raised now.
1862
1863- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1864 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1865 instead of from DLL teardown.
1866
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001867Mac
1868---
1869
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001870- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001871 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001872 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1873 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1874 the executable in the bundle.
1875
1876- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001877
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001878- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1879
1880- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1881 on Panther.
1882
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001883What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1884================================
1885
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001886*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001887
1888Core and builtins
1889-----------------
1890
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001891- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1892 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1893 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1894 with the -i option.
1895
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001896- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1897 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1898
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001899- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1900 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1901
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001902- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1903 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1904 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1905 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1906 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1907 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1908 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1909 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1910 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1911 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1912 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1913 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1914 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001915
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001916- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1917 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1918 embedded in a lambda expression.
1919
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001920- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1921 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1922 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1923 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1924 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1925
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001926- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1927 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1928 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1929
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001930- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1931 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1932
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001933- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1934 It's writable again.
1935
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001936- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1937 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1938 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001939 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001940
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001941- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1942 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1943 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1944
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001945Extension modules
1946-----------------
1947
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001948- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1949 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1950
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001951- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1952 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1953 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1954 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1955
1956- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1957 collection.
1958
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001959- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1960 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1961 unique within a single program run.
1962
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001963- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1964 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1965
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001966- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1967 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1968
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001969- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1970 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001971
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001972- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1973
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001974- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1975 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1976
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001977- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1978 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1979 for many BSD-derived systems.
1980
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001981
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001982Library
1983-------
1984
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001985- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1986 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1987 primary ones:
1988
1989 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1990 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1991 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1992
1993 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1994 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1995 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1996 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1997 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1998 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1999
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002000- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2001 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2002 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2003 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2004 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2005 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2006 argument.
2007
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002008- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2009 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2010 in the archive.
2011
2012- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2013 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2014
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002015- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2016 569574).
2017
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002018- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2019 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2020 no more.
2021
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002022- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2023 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2024 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2025 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2026 code coverage.
2027
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002028- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2029 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2030 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002031 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2032 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002033
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002034- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2035 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2036 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002037 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002038
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002039- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2040
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002041- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2042 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2043 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2044 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2045
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002046- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2047 handling.
2048
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002049- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2050 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2051
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002052- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2053 in socket.py.
2054
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002055- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2056
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002057- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2058 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2059 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2060 opener with proxy support.
2061
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002062- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2063
2064- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2065
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002066Tools/Demos
2067-----------
2068
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002069- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2070
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002071- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2072
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002073- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2074 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002075
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002076- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2077 files.
2078
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002079Build
2080-----
2081
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002082- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002083 different root directory.
2084
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002085C API
2086-----
2087
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002088- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2089 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2090 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2091 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2092 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2093 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2094 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2095 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2096 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2097 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2098
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002099- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2100 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2101 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2102 from Python.
2103
2104
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002105New platforms
2106-------------
2107
2108None this time.
2109
2110Tests
2111-----
2112
2113- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2114 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2115
2116Windows
2117-------
2118
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002119- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2120
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002121- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2122 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2123 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2124 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2125 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2126 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2127 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2128 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2129 that's what it's for.
2130
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002131Mac
2132---
2133
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002134- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2135 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2136 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2137 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002138- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2139 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2140- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002141
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002142SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2143------------------------------------
2144
2145430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2146598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2147622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2148661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2149683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2150697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2151713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2152724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2153727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2154729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2155730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2156731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2157732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2158733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2159735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2160740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2161744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2162745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2163747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2164749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2165751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2166753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2167755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2168757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2169760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2170
2171
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002172What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2173================================
2174
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002175*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002176
2177Core and builtins
2178-----------------
2179
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002180- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2181 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2182
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002183- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2184 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2185 and cannot be strings).
2186
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002187- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2188 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2189 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2190 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2191
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002192- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2193 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2194 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2195 Python itself.
2196
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002197- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2198 the referenced object, if it has one.
2199
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002200- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2201 the thread started at
2202 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2203
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002204- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2205 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2206 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2207 placed on a list index.
2208
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002209- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2210 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2211 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2212 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2213
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002214- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2215 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2216 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2217 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2218 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2219 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2220 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2221
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002222- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2223 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2224 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2225 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2226 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2227
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002228- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2229 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002230
2231- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2232 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2233 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2234 #693195.)
2235
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002236- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2237 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002238
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002239- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002240 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002241 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2242 interpreter executions, would fail.
2243
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002244- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002245 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002246 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002247
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002248Extension modules
2249-----------------
2250
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002251- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2252 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2253 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2254 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2255
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002256- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2257 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2258
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002259- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2260 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2261 and Greg Chapman.)
2262
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002263- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2264 recursively.
2265
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002266- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002267 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2268 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2269 leaks.
2270
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002271- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2272
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002273- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2274 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2275 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2276 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2277 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2278 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2279 #705836.
2280
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002281- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002282 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2283
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002284- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2285 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2286 See SF bug #692416.
2287
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002288- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2289 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2290
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002291- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2292 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2293 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002294
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002295- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002296 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2297 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2298
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002299- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2300 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2301 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2302 timeouts to work properly.
2303
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002304Library
2305-------
2306
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002307- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2308 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2309 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2310 future release.
2311
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002312- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2313 for querying platform dependent features.
2314
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002315- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002316
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002317- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2318 pickle protocol versions.
2319
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002320- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2321 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2322 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2323
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002324- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2325
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002326- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2327 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2328 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2329 modules.
2330
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002331- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2332 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2333 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2334
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002335- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2336 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2337
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002338- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2339 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2340 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2341
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002342- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002343 MS Office extensions.
2344
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002345- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2346 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2347
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002348- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2349 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2350
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002351- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2352 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2353 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2354 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2355 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2356 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2357
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002358- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2359 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2360 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002361
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002362- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2363 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2364 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2365
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002366- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2367
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002368- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2369 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2370 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2371
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002372Tools/Demos
2373-----------
2374
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002375- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2376 See the module docstring for details.
2377
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002378Build
2379-----
2380
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002381- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2382 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002383
2384C API
2385-----
2386
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002387- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2388
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002389- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2390 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2391 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2392
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002393- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2394 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002395
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002396 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2397 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2398 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002399
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002400- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002401 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2402
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002403- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2404 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2405 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002406
2407New platforms
2408-------------
2409
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002410None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002411
2412Tests
2413-----
2414
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002415- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2416 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002417
2418Windows
2419-------
2420
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002421- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2422 function.
2423
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002424- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2425 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002426
2427Mac
2428---
2429
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002430- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2431 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002432
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002433- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2434 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002435
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002436- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2437 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2438 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002439
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002440- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002441 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2442 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002443
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002444- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2445 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002446
2447
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002448What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2449=================================
2450
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002451*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002452
2453Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002454-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002455
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002456- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2457 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2458 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2459
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002460- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2461 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2462 (SF patch #664376.)
2463
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002464- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2465 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2466 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2467 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2468 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2469 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002470 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002471
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002472- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2473 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2474 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2475 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002476 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002477
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002478- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2479 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2480 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2481 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2482 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2483 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2484 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2485 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2486 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2487 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2488 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2489
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002490- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2491 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2492 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2493 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2494 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2495 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2496
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002497- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2498 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2499
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002500- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2501 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2502 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2503 case.)
2504
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002505- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2506 passed as unicode strings.
2507
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002508- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2509 See SF bug #683467.
2510
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002511- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2512 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2513
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002514- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2515
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002516- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2517
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002518- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2519 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2520 arguments.
2521
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002522- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2523 See SF bug #667147.
2524
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002525- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002526 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002527 See SF bug #676155.
2528
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002529- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002530 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002531 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2532 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2533 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2534 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2535 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2536 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002537
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002538Extension modules
2539-----------------
2540
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002541- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2542 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2543 tp_as_number pointer.
2544
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002545- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2546 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2547 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2548 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2549 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2550
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002551- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2552
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002553- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2554
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002555- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002556 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002557 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2558 patch #678531.)
2559
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002560- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2561 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2562
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002563- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2564 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2565
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002566- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2567
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002568- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2569 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2570 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2571
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002572- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2573
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002574- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2575 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2576
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002577- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002578
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002579- datetime changes:
2580
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002581 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2582
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002583 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2584 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2585 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2586 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2587 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2588 now.
2589
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002590 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002591 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2592 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002593
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002594 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002595 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002596 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2597 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2598 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2599 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002600
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002601 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2602 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2603 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002604 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2605
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002606 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2607 by a later example coded by Guido.
2608
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002609 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002610 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2611 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2612 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002613 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2614 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2615
2616 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2617 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2618 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2619 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2620 tzinfo subclass instance.
2621
2622 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2623 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2624 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2625 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2626 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2627 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2628 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2629 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002630
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002631 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2632 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2633 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2634 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2635 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002636 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2637
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002638 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002639
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002640 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2641 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2642 as a naive datetime object.
2643
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002644 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2645 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2646 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2647
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002648 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2649 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2650 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2651 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2652 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2653 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2654 comparison.
2655
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002656 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2657 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2658 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2659 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002660 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002661
2662 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002663
2664 and ::
2665
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002666 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2667
2668 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2669 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2670 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2671 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2672
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002673 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2674 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2675 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2676 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2677 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2678
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002679 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2680 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002681 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2682 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002683
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002684Library
2685-------
2686
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002687- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2688 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2689
2690- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2691 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2692 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2693 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2694 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2695 See PEP 307 for details.
2696
2697- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2698 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2699
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002700- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2701 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002702 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002703 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2704 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002705 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002706
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002707- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2708 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2709
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002710- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2711 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2712 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2713
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002714- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2715
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002716- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2717 exception.
2718
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002719- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2720 class.
2721
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002722- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2723 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2724 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2725
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002726- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2727 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2728
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002729- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002730 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2731 See SF bug #659228.
2732
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002733- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2734 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2735 See SF patch #651082.
2736
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002737- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002738
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002739- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2740 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2741
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002742- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002743 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002744
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002745- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2746 DOS paths from other platforms.
2747
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002748Tools/Demos
2749-----------
2750
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002751- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2752 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2753 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2754 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2755 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2756 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2757 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2758 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2759 example:
2760
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002761 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2762 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002763
2764 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2765
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002766
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002767Build
2768-----
2769
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002770- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2771 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2772 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002773 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2774
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002775 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2776
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002777- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2778 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2779 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2780 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2781 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2782 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2783 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2784 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2785 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2786
2787- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2788 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2789 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2790 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2791
2792- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2793 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2794
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002795C API
2796-----
2797
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002798- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2799 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002800
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002801- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2802 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2803 tp_as_number pointer.
2804
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002805- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2806 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2807 (SF #681367)
2808
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002809- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2810 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2811 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2812 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002813
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002814Tests
2815-----
2816
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002817- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002818 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2819 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2820 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2821 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2822 pydoc.)
2823
2824- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2825
2826- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002827
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002828Windows
2829-------
2830
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002831- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2832 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2833 time).
2834
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002835- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2836 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2837
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002838- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2839 release without strong cryptography.
2840
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002841- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002842 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002843
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002844- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2845 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2846
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002847Mac
2848---
2849
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002850- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2851 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002852
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002853- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2854 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2855 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002856
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002857- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2858 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002859
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002860- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2861 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2862 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2863 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002864
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002865- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002866 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2867 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2868 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002869
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002870
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002871What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002872=================================
2873
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002874*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002875
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002876Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002877--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002878
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002879- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2880
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002881- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2882 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002883 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002884 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002885 a different meaning than before.
2886
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002887- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002888 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002889 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002890
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002891- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002892 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002893 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002894
2895- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2896 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2897 and deallocation.
2898
2899- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2900 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2901
2902- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2903 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2904 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2905 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2906 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2907
2908- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2909 now detected by the garbage collector.
2910
2911- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2912 [SF bug 519621]
2913
2914- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2915 identifier.
2916
2917- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2918 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2919 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2920 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2921 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2922 [SF bug 563060]
2923
2924- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2925 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2926 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2927 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2928 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2929
2930- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2931 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2932 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2933
2934- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2935
2936- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2937 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2938 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2939 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2940 state of the slots would be lost.)
2941
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002942Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002943-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002944
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002945- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002946 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2947 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2948 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2949 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002950 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2951 Jython 2.1.
2952
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002953- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002954 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002955 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2956 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2957 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2958 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2959 these, see PEP 302.
2960
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002961- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2962 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2963 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2964
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002965- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2966 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2967 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2968
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002969- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2970 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2971 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2972
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002973- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2974 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2975 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2976 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2977 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2978 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2979 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2980 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2981 releases or implementations.
2982
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002983- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002984 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2985 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002986
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002987- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2988 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2989
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002990- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2991 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2992 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2993
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002994- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2995 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2996
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002997- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2998 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002999 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3000 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003001
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003002- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3003 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3004 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3005 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3006 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3007
3008 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3009 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3010 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3011 pattern.
3012
3013 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3014 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3015 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3016 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3017
3018 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3019 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3020 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3021 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3022 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3023 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3024
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003025- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3026 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3027 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3028 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3029 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3030 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3031 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3032 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003033
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003034- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3035 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3036 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3037 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3038 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003039 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3040 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3041 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3042 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3043 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3044 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3045 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003046
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003047- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3048 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3049
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003050- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3051 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3052 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3053 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3054 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3055 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3056 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3057 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3058 to Zack Weinberg!
3059
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003060- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3061 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3062 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3063 type. This has been fixed now.
3064
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003065- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3066 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3067 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3068
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003069- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3070 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3071 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3072 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3073 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3074 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3075 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3076 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003077 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003078
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003079- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3080 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3081 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003082
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003083- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3084 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3085 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3086 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3087 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3088 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3089 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3090 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003091 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003092 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3093 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3094
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003095- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3096 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3097 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3098 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3099 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3100 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3101 this.)
3102
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003103- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3104 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003105 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003106 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003107 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3108 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003109 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3110 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003111
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003112- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3113 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3114 currently running.
3115
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003116- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3117 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3118 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3119 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3120
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003121- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3122 as directory names.
3123
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003124- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3125 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3126
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003127- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3128 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3129
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003130- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003131 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3132 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003133
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003134- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3135 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3136 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3137 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3138 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3139
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003140- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3141 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3142 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3143 removed.
3144
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003145- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3146 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3147 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3148
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003149- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3150 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3151 to __debug__.
3152
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003153- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3154 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3155 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3156
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003157- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3158 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3159 deprecated now.
3160
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003161- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3162 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3163 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003164
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003165- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3166 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3167 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3168 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3169 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003170
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003171- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3172 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3173
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003174- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3175 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3176 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003177 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003178 is backward compatible.
3179
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003180- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3181 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3182 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3183 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3184 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3185
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003186- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3187 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3188 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3189 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3190 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3191 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003192
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003193- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3194 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3195
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003196- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3197 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3198
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003199- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3200 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3201 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3202 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3203 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3204
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003205- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3206 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3207 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3208
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003209- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003210 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3211
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003212- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3213 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3214 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003215
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003216- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3217 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3218
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003219- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3220 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3221 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3222
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003223- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3224
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003225Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003226-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003227
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003228- Added three operators to the operator module:
3229 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3230 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3231 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3232
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003233- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3234
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003235- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3236 archives.
3237
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003238- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3239 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3240 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3241
3242 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3243
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003244- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3245 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3246 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003247 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003248
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003249- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3250 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3251 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3252 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003253 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3254 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3255 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3256 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003257
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003258- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3259 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003260
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003261- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3262
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003263- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3264 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3265
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003266- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3267 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3268 supported.
3269
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003270- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3271
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003272- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3273 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003274
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003275- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3276 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3277
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003278- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3279
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003280- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3281 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3282
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003283- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3284 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3285 functions but callable type objects.
3286
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003287- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003288 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003289 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003290
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003291- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3292 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003293
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003294- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3295 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003296
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003297- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3298 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3299 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3300 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3301
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003302- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3303 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003304
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003305- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3306 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3307 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3308 and __imul__.
3309
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003310- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003311 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3312 is called.
3313
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003314- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3315 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3316 interpreter was compiled.
3317
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003318- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3319 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3320 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003321 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003322 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3323 1, not 2.
3324
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003325- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3326 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3327 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3328 limit.
3329
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003330- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3331 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3332 bug #623464.
3333
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003334- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3335 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3336 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3337 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3338
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003339Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003340-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003341
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003342- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3343
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003344- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3345 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3346 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3347 with Python 2.3a2.
3348
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003349- os.path exposes getctime.
3350
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003351- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003352 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003353 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003354 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003355 unit tests of floating point results.
3356
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003357- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3358 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3359 has been increased.
3360
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003361- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3362 executed.
3363
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003364- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3365 postinstallation script.
3366
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003367- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3368 test the current module.
3369
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003370- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003371 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3372 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3373 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3374 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3375
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003376- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003377 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003378 Ward's Optik package.
3379
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003380- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3381 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3382 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3383 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3384
3385- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3386 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003387 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003388
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003389- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3390 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3391 shelf are binary pickles.
3392
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003393- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3394 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3395
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003396- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3397 modules are iterators now.
3398
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003399- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3400 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3401 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3402 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3403 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3404 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003405
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003406- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3407 with their entity value.
3408
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003409- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3410
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003411- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3412 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003413
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003414- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3415 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003416 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003417
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003418- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3419 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3420 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3421 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3422 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3423 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3424 main():
3425
3426 import locale
3427 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3428
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003429- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3430 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3431
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003432- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3433 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3434 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3435 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3436 to the new standard.
3437
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003438- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3439 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3440 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3441 an extension to the database.
3442
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003443- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3444 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3445 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3446 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003447 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003448
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003449- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003450 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003451
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003452- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3453 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3454 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3455 bounded integers.
3456
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003457- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3458 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3459 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3460 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3461 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3462 in existence.
3463
3464 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3465 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3466 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3467 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3468 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3469 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3470
3471 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3472 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3473 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3474 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3475
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003476- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3477 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3478 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3479
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003480- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3481
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003482- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3483 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3484 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3485 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3486
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003487- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3488 argument.
3489
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003490- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3491 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3492 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3493 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3494 [SF patch 560794].
3495
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003496- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3497 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3498 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003499 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3500 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3501 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003502
3503- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3504 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003505
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003506- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3507 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3508 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3509 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003510
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003511- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3512 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3513 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3514 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3515 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3516
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003517- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003518
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003519- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3520
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003521- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3522 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3523 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3524 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3525 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3526 identical to None.
3527
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003528- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3529 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3530 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3531 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3532 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3533 results now.
3534
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003535- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3536 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3537
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003538- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3539 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3540 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3541 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3542 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3543 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3544 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3545 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3546
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003547- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3548
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003549- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3550 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3551
3552- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3553 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3554 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3555 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3556 and other systems.
3557
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003558- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3559 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3560 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3561 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 +00003562 work well with these.
3563
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003564- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3565
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003566- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003567 connections.
3568
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003569- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3570 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3571 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3572
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003573- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3574 sets
3575
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003576- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3577 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3578 name.
3579
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003580- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3581 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3582 passed in.
3583
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003584- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003585 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003586 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3587 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003588
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003589- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3590
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003591- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3592
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003593- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3594 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3595 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3596
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003597- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3598 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3599 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3600 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003601 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003602
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003603- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003604 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003605 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003606
3607- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3608 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3609 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3610
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003611- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003612 the value of its expression argument.
3613
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003614- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3615 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3616 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3617
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003618- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3619 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3620 skipstone browser was included.
3621
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003622- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3623 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3624
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003625Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003626-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003627
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003628- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3629 names in addition to accepting file names.
3630
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003631- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3632 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3633 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3634 still used and useful.)
3635
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003636- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3637 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3638 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3639 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003640
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003641- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3642 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3643 the generated binary.
3644
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003645Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003646-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003647
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003648- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3649
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003650- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3651 except in the hands of experts.
3652
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003653- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003654 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3655 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3656 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003657
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003658- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3659 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3660 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3661 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3662 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3663 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3664 builds.
3665
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003666- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3667 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3668 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3669 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3670 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3671 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3672 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3673 new type.
3674
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003675- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003676
3677 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3678 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3679 positive infinities.
3680
3681 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3682 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3683 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3684 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3685 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3686 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3687 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3688
3689 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3690
3691 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3692
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003693- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3694 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3695 size of the executable.
3696
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003697- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3698 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3699 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3700 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003701
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003702- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3703
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003704- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3705 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3706 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003707
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003708- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3709 well as Unix.
3710
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003711- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3712 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3713 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3714 modules in the README file for details.
3715
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003716C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003717-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003718
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003719- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3720 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003721 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003722 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003723 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003724
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003725- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3726 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3727 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3728 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3729 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3730 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003731 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003732 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3733 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3734 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3735 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3736 aligned.)
3737
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003738- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3739 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3740 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3741
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003742- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3743 level.
3744
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003745- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3746 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3747 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3748 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3749 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3750
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003751- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3752 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3753 code.
3754
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003755- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3756 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3757 adjusting for negative indices.
3758
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003759- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3760 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3761 object.
3762
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003763- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3764 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3765 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3766
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003767- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3768 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003769
3770- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3771
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003772- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3773 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3774 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3775 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3776
3777- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3778
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003779- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003780
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003781- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003782 without going through the buffer API.
3783
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003784- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003785
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003786- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3787 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3788 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3789 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3790
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003791- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3792 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3793
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003794- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003795 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3796
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003797New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003798-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003799
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003800- OpenVMS is now supported.
3801
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003802- AtheOS is now supported.
3803
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003804- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3805
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003806- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3807
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003808Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003809-----
3810
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003811- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3812 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3813 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003814
3815Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003816-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003817
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003818- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3819 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3820 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3821 bugs.
3822 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003823 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003824 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3825 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003826 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003827
3828- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003829 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003830
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003831- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3832 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3833
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003834- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3835 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003836 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003837 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3838
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003839- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3840 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3841 use files" uninstall option).
3842
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003843- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3844
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003845- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3846 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3847
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003848- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3849 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3850 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3851
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003852- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3853 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3854 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3855 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3856 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003857 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3858 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3859 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003860
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003861- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003862 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003863 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3864 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3865 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3866 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3867 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3868 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3869 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3870 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3871 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3872 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3873 work around.
3874
3875- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3876 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3877 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3878 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3879 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3880 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3881 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3882 specified with O_CREAT too).
3883
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003884Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003885----
3886
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003887- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003888
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003889- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3890 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3891 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3892
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003893- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3894 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3895 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3896
3897- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3898 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3899 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3900 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3901 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3902 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3903 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3904 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003905
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003906- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3907 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3908 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003909
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003910- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3911 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3912 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3913 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3914 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003915
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003916- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3917 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3918 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003919
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003920- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3921 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003922
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003923- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3924 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3925 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3926 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3927 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003928
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003929- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3930 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3931 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3932
3933- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3934 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3935 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003936
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003937- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3938 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3939 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3940 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003941 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003942
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003943- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3944 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003945
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003946- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3947 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003948
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003949- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003950 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003951 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3952 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003953
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003954
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003955What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003956===============================
3957
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003958*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3959
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003960Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003961--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003962
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003963- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3964 with a custom metaclass.
3965
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003966Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003967-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003968
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003969- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3970 are proxies.
3971
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003972Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003973-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003974
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003975- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3976 very short strings.
3977
3978- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3979 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3980 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3981 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3982 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3983
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003984Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003985-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003986
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003987- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3988 close or delete time).
3989
3990- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3991 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3992
3993- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3994
3995- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003996 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003997
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003998Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003999-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004000
4001Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004002-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004003
4004C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004005-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004006
4007New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004008-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004009
4010Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004011-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004012
4013Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004014-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004015
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004016- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4017
4018- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4019 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4020
4021- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4022 deleted at process exit time.
4023
4024- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4025 in backslash.
4026
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004027Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004028----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004029
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004030- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4031 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4032 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4033
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004034
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004035What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004036===========================
4037
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004038*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4039
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004040Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004041--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004042
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004043- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4044 been extensively updated. See
4045
4046 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4047
4048 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4049
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004050- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4051 deleted!
4052
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004053- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4054 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4055 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4056 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4057 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4058
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004059- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4060
4061 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4062 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4063
4064 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4065 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4066 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4067 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4068 supported anyway.
4069
4070 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4071 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4072
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004073- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4074 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4075 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4076 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4077 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004078
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004079- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4080 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4081 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4082
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004083Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004084-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004085
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004086- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4087 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4088 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4089 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4090 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4091 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004092 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4093 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4094 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4095 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004096
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004097- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4098 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4099 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4100
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004101Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004102-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004103
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004104- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4105
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004106Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004107-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004108
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004109- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4110 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4111 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4112 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4113 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4114 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4115
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004116- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4117
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004118- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4119
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004120- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4121
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004122- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4123 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4124 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4125
4126- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4127
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004128Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004129-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004130
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004131- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4132 off a search on Google.
4133
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004134Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004135-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004136
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004137- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4138 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4139 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4140 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4141 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4142 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4143 other platforms should do likewise.
4144
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004145- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4146 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4147 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4148
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004149C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004150-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004151
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004152- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4153 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4154 producing key-value pairs.
4155
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004156- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004157 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004158 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4159 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4160 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4161 previously went unchallenged.
4162
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004163New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004164-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004165
4166Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004167-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004168
4169Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004170-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004171
4172Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004173----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004174
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004175- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4176 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004177
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004178- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4179 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4180 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4181 home.
4182
4183
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004184What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004185===========================
4186
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004187*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4188
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004189Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004190--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004191
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004192- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4193 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004194
4195 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004196 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004197
4198 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4199 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004200 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004201 This needs to be documented.
4202
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004203- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4204 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4205
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004206- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4207 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4208 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4209
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004210- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4211 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4212
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004213- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4214 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4215 class forbids it).
4216
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004217- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4218 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4219 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4220
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004221- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4222
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004223Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004224-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004225
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004226- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4227 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004228 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004229
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004230- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4231 (like 1 + '').
4232
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004233Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004234-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004235
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004236- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4237 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4238 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4239 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004240 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004241 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4242
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004243- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4244 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4245 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4246 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4247
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004248- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4249 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004250 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4251 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4252 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004253
4254- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4255 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004256
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004257- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4258 bytes on its input.
4259
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004260Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004261-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004262
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004263- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004264 convenience function.
4265
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004266- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4267 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4268 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004269 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4270 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4271 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4272 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4273 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4274 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004275
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004276- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4277 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4278 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4279 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4280
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004281- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4282 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4283 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4284
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004285- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4286 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4287 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4288 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4289
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004290- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4291 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004293 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4294 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4295 new -l and -e options.
4296
4297- statcache is now deprecated.
4298
4299- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4300 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004301 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004302 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4303 time properly taken into account.
4304
4305- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4306 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4307 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4308 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4309
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004310Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004311-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004312
4313Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004314-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004315
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004316- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4317 is built with libdb3 if available.
4318
4319- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4320
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004321C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004322-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004323
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004324- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4325 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4326 PySequence_Size().
4327
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004328- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4329
4330- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4331 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4332 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4333
4334- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4335 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4336
4337- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4338 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4339
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004340New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004341-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004342
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004343- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4344 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4345
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004346- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4347 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4348
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004349- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4350
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004351Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004352-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004353
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004354- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4355 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4356
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004357Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004358-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004359
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004360Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004361----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004362
4363- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4364 removed completely in the next release.
4365
4366- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4367 OSX.
4368
4369- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4370 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4371
4372- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4373
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004374
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004375What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004376===========================
4377
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004378*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4379
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004380Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004381--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004382
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004383- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004384 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004385 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004386 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4387 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004388 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4389 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004390 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4391 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004392
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004393- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4394 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4395
4396- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4397 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4398
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004399Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004400-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004401
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004402- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4403 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4404 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4405 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4406 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4407 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4408 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4409 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4410
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004411- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4412 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4413 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4414 example).
4415
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004416- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004417 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004418 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004419 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004420
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004421- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4422 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4423 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004424 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004425
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004426- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4427 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4428 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4429 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4430 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4431 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4432
4433 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4434
4435 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4436
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004437Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004438-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004439
4440- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4441
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004442- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4443
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004444- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4445 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004446
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004447- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4448 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4449 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4450 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4451 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4452 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004453 attributes.
4454
4455- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4456 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4457 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004458
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004459- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4460 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4461 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004462
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004463- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4464 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4465 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004466 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4467 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4468
4469- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4470 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004471
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004472Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004473-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004474
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004475- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4476 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4477
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004478- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4479 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4480 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4481 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4482
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004483- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4484 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4485 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4486 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4487
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004488 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4489 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4490 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4491 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4492 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4493 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4494 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4495 without losing information).
4496
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004497- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004498 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4499 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4500 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4501 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4502 module).
4503
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004504 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004505 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4506 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4507 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4508 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004509
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004510- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004511 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4512 encoding.
4513
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004514- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4515 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4516
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004517- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004518 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4519
4520- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4521 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4522 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4523 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4524
4525- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4526
4527- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4528 ON, and OFF.
4529
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004530- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4531 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4532
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004533Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004534-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004535
4536- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4537 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4538 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004539
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004540- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4541 been added: -X and -E.
4542
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004543Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004544-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004545
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004546- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4547 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4548
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004549C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004550-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004551
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004552- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4553 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4554 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4555 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4556 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4557
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004558- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4559 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4560 as long) arguments.
4561
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004562- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4563 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4564 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4565 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4566 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4567 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4568
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004569- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4570 input.
4571
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004572New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004573-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004574
4575Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004576-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004577
4578Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004579-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004580
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004581- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4582 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4583 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4584
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004585- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4586 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4587 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004588 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004589
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4591 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4592 import signal
4593 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004594
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004595 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004596 while 1:
4597 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004598 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004599 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4600 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4601 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4602 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004603
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004604
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004605What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4606===========================
4607
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004608*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4609
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004610Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004612
4613- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4614 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4615 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4616
4617- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4618 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4619 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4620 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4621 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4622 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4623 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004624
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004625- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004626 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004627 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4628 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4629 associate a docstring with a property.
4630
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004631- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4632 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4633 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4634 other built-in object types.
4635
4636- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4637 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4638 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4639 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4640 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4641
4642- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4643 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4644
4645- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4646 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004647 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004648 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4649 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4650 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4651 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4652 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4653
4654- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4655 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4656 class.
4657
4658- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4659 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4660 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4661 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4662
4663- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4664 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4665 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4666 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4667
4668- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4669 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4670
4671- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4672 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4673 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4674 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4675 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004676 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004677 with the same value as s.
4678
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004679- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4680
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004681Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004682----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004683
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004684- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4685
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004686- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4687 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4688 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4689 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4690 objects.
4691
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004692- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4693 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004694 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4695 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4696
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004697- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4698 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4699 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4700
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004701Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004702-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004703
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004704- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4705 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4706 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4707 by the instances.
4708
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004709- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4710 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4711 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4712
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004713- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4714 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4715 before the entire comparison is complete.
4716
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004717- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4718 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4719 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4720
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004721- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4722 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4723 getwriter().
4724
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004725- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4726 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4727
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004728- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004729 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4730 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4731
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004732- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4733 iterable object.
4734
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004735- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4736 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004737
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004738- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4739 authentication.
4740
4741- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4742 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004743
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004744- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004745 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4746 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4747 a sample driver.)
4748
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004749Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004751
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004752- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4753 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4754 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4755 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4756 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4757 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4758 kernel has large file support.
4759
4760- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4761 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4762 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4763 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4764 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4765
4766- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4767 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4768 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4769
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004770C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004771-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004772
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004773- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4774 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4775
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004776New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004777-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004778
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004779- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4780 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4781
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004782Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004783-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004784
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004785- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4786 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4787 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4788 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4789 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4790
4791- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4792 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4793 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4794 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4795
4796- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4797 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4798
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004799Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004800-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004801
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004802- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004803 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4804 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004805
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004806
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004807What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4808===========================
4809
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004810*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4811
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004812Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004813----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004814
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004815- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4816 big to represent as a C double.
4817
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004818- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4819 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4820 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4821 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4822 restriction).
4823
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004824- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4825 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4826 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4827 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4828 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4829
4830 >>> dir([])
4831 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4832 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4833 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4834 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4835 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4836 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4837 'reverse', 'sort']
4838
4839 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4840
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004841- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004842 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4843 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4844 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4845 OverflowError exception.
4846
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004847- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004848 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004849 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4850 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4851 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4852 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4853 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004854 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004855 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4856 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4857
4858 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4859 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4860 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4861 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004862
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004863- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004864 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4865 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4866 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4867 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4868 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4869 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4870 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4871 once it is created.
4872
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004873- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4874 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4875 (key, value) pairs.
4876
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004877- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004878 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4879 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4880
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004881- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4882 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4883 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4884 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4885 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004886
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004887- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004888 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4889 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4890
4891 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4892
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004893- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004894 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4895
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004896Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004897-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004898
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004899- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004900 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4901 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004902
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004903- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4904 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4905 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4906 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4907 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4908 in this area anymore).
4909
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004910- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4911 threading.Timer.
4912
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004913- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4914 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4915
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004916- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004917 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4918
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004919- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004920 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4921 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4922 converted to Python longs.
4923
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004924- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004925 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4926
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004927- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4928 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4929 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4930
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004931Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004932-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004933
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004934- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4935 division operators as per PEP 238.
4936
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004937Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004938-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004939
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004940- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4941 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4942 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4943 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4944
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004945C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004946-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004947
4948- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004949
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004950- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4951 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004952 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004953
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004954 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4955 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004956 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004957 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004958
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004959- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004960 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4961 module:
4962
4963 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004964
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004965 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4966 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004967
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004968 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4969 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004970
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004971 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4972
4973 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4974
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004975- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004976 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4977 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4978 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004979
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004980New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004981-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004982
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004983- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4984 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4985 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4986 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4987 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004988
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004989Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004990-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004991
4992Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004993-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004994
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004995- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4996 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4997 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4998 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004999 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5000 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5001 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5002 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5003 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005004
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005005- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005006 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5007
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005008
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005009What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5010===========================
5011
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005012*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5013
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005014Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005015-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005016
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005017- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5018 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5019
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005020- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5021 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5022 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005023
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005024- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5025 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5026 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5027 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005028
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005029- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5030
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005031- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005032
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005033Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005034-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005035
5036- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005037 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005038 the module docstring for details.
5039
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005040Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005041-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005042
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005043- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005044 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5045 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5046 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005047
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005048- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5049 Nick Mathewson.
5050
5051Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005052----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005053
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005054- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5055 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5056 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5057 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5058 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5059 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5060 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5061 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5062
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005063- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5064 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5065 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5066 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5067
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005068- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5069 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5070 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5071 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5072 come a long way).
5073
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005074- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5075 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5076 write filters for these warnings).
5077
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005078- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5079 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5080 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5081 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5082 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5083
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005084- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5085 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5086 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5087 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5088 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5089 older distribution.
5090
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005091Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005092-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005093
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005094- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5095 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005096 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005097
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005098- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5099 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5100 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5101
5102- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5103
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005104- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5105
5106- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5107
5108- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5109
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005110- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005111
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005112- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5113
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005114New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005115-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005116
5117C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005118-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005119
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005120- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5121 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5122 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5123 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5124 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5125 against buffer overruns.
5126
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005127- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005128 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5129 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005130 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5131 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5132 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5133
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005134- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5135 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5136 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5137 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5138 deprecated.
5139
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005140Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005141-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005142
5143- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5144 relevant is found.
5145
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005146
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005147What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005148===========================
5149
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005150*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5151
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005152Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005153----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005154
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005155- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5156 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5157 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5158 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5159 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5160 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5161 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5162 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005163 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005164 repaired.
5165
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005166- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005167 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005168 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5169 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5170 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5171 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5172 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5173 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5174 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5175 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5176
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005177- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5178 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5179 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5180 leading BMO character).
5181
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005182- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5183 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5184 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5185
5186 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5187 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5188 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005189
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005190 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5191 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5192 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5193 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5194 for various simple to use conversions.
5195
5196 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5197 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5198
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005199 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5200 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5201 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5202 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5203 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5204 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5205 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5206 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5207 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5208 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5209 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5210 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5211 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5212 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5213 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005214
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005215- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5216 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5217 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005218 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005219 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005220
5221 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005222 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5223 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5224 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5225 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5226 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005227 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5228 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005229
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005230 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5231 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5232 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005233 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005234
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005235- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5236 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5237 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5238 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5239 floating arithmetic,
5240
5241 x = 9007199254740992.0
5242 print long(x)
5243
5244 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5245 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5246 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5247 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5248 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5249 functions are of good quality).
5250
5251 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5252 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5253 algorithms to break.
5254
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005255- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5256 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5257 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5258 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5259 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5260 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5261 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5262 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5263 order.
5264
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005265- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5266 operation along the most common code paths.
5267
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005268- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5269 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5270
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005271- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5272 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5273 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5274 {}.update(UserDict())
5275
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005276- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5277 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5278 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5279 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5280 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5281 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5282 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5283 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5284
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005285- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005286 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005287
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005288 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005289 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5290 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005291 join() method of strings
5292 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005293 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5294 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005295 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005296 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005297
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005298- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5299 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5300
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005301- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5302 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5303
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005304- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5305 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5306 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5307 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5308
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005309- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5310 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005311 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005312 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5313 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005314
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005315- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5316
5317
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005318Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005319-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005320
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005321- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005322 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005323 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5324 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5325
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005326- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5327 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5328
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005329- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5330 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5331 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5332 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5333
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005334- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5335 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5336 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5337
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005338- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5339
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005340- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5341
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005342- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5343 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5344 that are still imported into string.py).
5345
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005346- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5347
5348- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5349 Now it does.
5350
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005351- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5352
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005353- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5354 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5355 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5356 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5357 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005358 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5359 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005360
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005361- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5362 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5363 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5364 'help(object)'.
5365
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005366Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005367-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005368
5369- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005370 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005371 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5372 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5373
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005374- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005375 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5376 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005377
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005378C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005379-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005380
5381- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5382 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005383
5384----
5385
5386**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**