blob: 684ba7f8cb38221c4830c1079e1783b8996b163a [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
Barry Warsaw97f005d2008-12-03 16:46:14 +00007What's New in Python 3.1 alpha 0
8================================
Barry Warsawd8ccd1c2008-11-21 15:13:37 +00009
Antoine Pitrou3ad3a0d2008-12-18 17:08:32 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-200X*
Barry Warsawd8ccd1c2008-11-21 15:13:37 +000011
12Core and Builtins
13-----------------
14
Antoine Pitrou81fabdb2009-01-22 10:11:36 +000015- Issue #4874: Most builtin decoders now reject unicode input.
16
Mark Dickinson9ffc0202009-01-20 20:45:53 +000017- Issue #4842: Don't allow trailing 'L' when constructing an integer
18 from a string.
19
Benjamin Peterson05e782f2009-01-19 15:15:02 +000020- Issue #4991: os.fdopen now raises an OSError for invalid file descriptors.
21
Antoine Pitroue4bc7f62009-01-17 21:06:43 +000022- Issue #4838: When a module is deallocated, free the memory backing the
23 optional module state data.
24
Mark Dickinson8055afd2009-01-17 10:04:45 +000025- Issue #4910: Rename nb_long slot to nb_reserved, and change its
26 type to (void *).
27
Antoine Pitrou8d4e5052009-01-13 22:59:11 +000028- Issue #4935: The overflow checking code in the expandtabs() method common
29 to str, bytes and bytearray could be optimized away by the compiler, letting
30 the interpreter segfault instead of raising an error.
31
Amaury Forgeot d'Arcf343e012009-01-12 23:58:21 +000032- Issue #3720: Fix a crash when an iterator modifies its class and removes its
33 __next__ method.
34
Mark Dickinsone5e298f2009-01-12 20:49:19 +000035- Issue #4910: Builtin int() function and PyNumber_Long/PyNumber_Int API
36 function no longer attempt to call the __long__ slot to convert an object
37 to an integer. Only the __int__ and __trunc__ slots are examined.
38
Martin v. Löwis7c2b66c2009-01-12 08:21:03 +000039- Issue #4893: Use NT threading on CE.
40
Martin v. Löwisec59d042009-01-12 07:59:10 +000041- Issue #4915: Port sysmodule to Windows CE.
42
Antoine Pitrouab868312009-01-10 15:40:25 +000043- Issue #4868: utf-8, utf-16 and latin1 decoding are now 2x to 4x faster. The
44 common cases are optimized thanks to a dedicated fast path and a moderate
45 amount of loop unrolling.
46
Antoine Pitrou14b78f52009-01-09 22:27:08 +000047- Issue #4074: Change the criteria for doing a full garbage collection (i.e.
48 collecting the oldest generation) so that allocating lots of objects without
49 destroying them does not show quadratic performance. Based on a proposal by
50 Martin von Löwis at
51 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-June/080579.html.
52
Vinay Sajip6268cbc2009-01-21 00:19:28 +000053- Issue #4604: Some objects of the I/O library could still be used after
Antoine Pitrou8043cf82009-01-09 19:54:29 +000054 having been closed (for instance, a read() call could return some
55 previously buffered data). Patch by Dmitry Vasiliev.
56
Antoine Pitrou05608432009-01-09 18:53:14 +000057- Issue #4705: Fix the -u ("unbuffered binary stdout and stderr") command-line
58 flag to work properly. Furthermore, when specifying -u, the text stdout
59 and stderr streams have line-by-line buffering enabled (the default being
60 to buffer arbitrary chunks of data).
61
Raymond Hettinger35631532009-01-09 03:58:09 +000062- The internal table, _PyLong_DigitValue, is now an array of unsigned chars
63 instead of ints (reducing its size from 4 to 8 times thereby reducing
64 Python's overall memory).
65
Antoine Pitroud35cbf62009-01-06 19:02:24 +000066- Issue #1180193: When importing a module from a .pyc (or .pyo) file with
67 an existing .py counterpart, override the co_filename attributes of all
68 code objects if the original filename is obsolete (which can happen if the
69 file has been renamed, moved, or if it is accessed through different paths).
70 Patch by Ziga Seilnacht and Jean-Paul Calderone.
71
Antoine Pitrouc3b39242009-01-03 16:59:18 +000072- Issue #4580: Fix slicing of memoryviews when the item size is greater than
73 one byte. Also fixes the meaning of len() so that it returns the number of
74 items, rather than the size in bytes.
75
Martin v. Löwis5c88d812009-01-02 20:47:48 +000076- Issue #4075: Use OutputDebugStringW in Py_FatalError.
77
Amaury Forgeot d'Arc374e2202009-01-01 23:05:36 +000078- Issue #4747: When the terminal does not use utf-8, executing a script with
79 non-ascii characters in its name could fail with a "SyntaxError: None" error.
80
Hirokazu Yamamoto0f22d692009-01-01 16:03:45 +000081- Issue #4797: IOError.filename was not set when _fileio.FileIO failed to open
Hirokazu Yamamoto8ed9a802009-01-01 16:09:52 +000082 file with `bytes' filename on Windows.
Hirokazu Yamamoto0f22d692009-01-01 16:03:45 +000083
Antoine Pitrou7ddda782009-01-01 15:35:33 +000084- Issue #3680: Reference cycles created through a dict, set or deque iterator
85 did not get collected.
86
Nick Coghlanf1f2f682008-12-30 07:29:12 +000087- Issue #4701: PyObject_Hash now implicitly calls PyType_Ready on types
88 where the tp_hash and tp_dict slots are both NULL.
89
Georg Brandlccc47b62008-12-28 11:44:14 +000090- Issue #4759: None is now allowed as the first argument of
91 bytearray.translate(). It was always allowed for bytes.translate().
92
Skip Montanaro80072cb2008-12-23 03:51:14 +000093- Added test case to ensure attempts to read from a file opened for writing
94 fail.
95
Antoine Pitrou51f3ef92008-12-20 13:14:23 +000096- Issue #3106: Speedup some comparisons (str/str and int/int).
97
Antoine Pitrouf289ae62008-12-18 11:06:25 +000098- Issue #2183: Simplify and optimize bytecode for list, dict and set
99 comprehensions. Original patch for list comprehensions by Neal Norwitz.
100
Antoine Pitrou621601a2008-12-17 23:18:19 +0000101- Issue #2467: gc.DEBUG_STATS reported invalid elapsed times. Also, always
102 print elapsed times, not only when some objects are uncollectable /
103 unreachable. Original patch by Neil Schemenauer.
104
Mark Dickinson54bc1ec2008-12-17 16:19:07 +0000105- Issue #3439: Add a bit_length method to int.
106
Mark Dickinsonda2706b2008-12-11 18:03:03 +0000107- Issue #2173: When getting device encoding, check that return value of
108 nl_langinfo is not the empty string. This was causing silent build
109 failures on OS X.
110
Jeffrey Yasskinb9083f32008-12-11 06:18:33 +0000111- Issue #4597: Fixed several opcodes that weren't always propagating
112 exceptions.
113
114- Issue #4589: Fixed exception handling when the __exit__ function of a
Amaury Forgeot d'Arc10b24e82008-12-10 23:49:33 +0000115 context manager returns a value that cannot be converted to a bool.
116
Mark Dickinsonfd24b322008-12-06 15:33:31 +0000117- Issue #4445: Replace "sizeof(PyBytesObject)" with
118 "offsetof(PyBytesObject, ob_sval) + 1" when allocating memory for
119 bytes instances. On a typical machine this saves 3 bytes of memory
120 (on average) per allocation of a bytes instance.
121
Christian Heimesa872de52008-12-05 08:26:55 +0000122- Issue #4533: File read operation was dreadfully slow due to a slowly
123 growing read buffer. Fixed by using the same growth rate algorithm as
124 Python 2.x.
125
Antoine Pitrou5504e892008-12-06 21:27:53 +0000126- Issue #4509: Various issues surrounding resize of bytearray objects to
127 which there are buffer exports (e.g. memoryview instances).
128
Georg Brandlf9734072008-12-07 15:30:06 +0000129- Issue #4233: Changed semantic of ``_fileio.FileIO``'s ``close()``
130 method on file objects with closefd=False. The file descriptor is still
131 kept open but the file object behaves like a closed file. The ``FileIO``
132 object also got a new readonly attribute ``closefd``.
Matthias Klose7e1b8fa2008-11-26 17:22:04 +0000133
Antoine Pitroubc420402008-12-07 20:14:49 +0000134- Issue #4569: Interpreter crash when mutating a memoryview with an item size
135 larger than 1.
136
Benjamin Peterson371ccfb2008-12-27 19:03:36 +0000137- Issue #4748: Lambda generators no longer return a value.
138
Barry Warsawd8ccd1c2008-11-21 15:13:37 +0000139Library
140-------
141
Jesse Noller41faa542009-01-25 03:45:53 +0000142- Fix and properly document the multiprocessing module's logging
143 support, expose the internal levels and provide proper usage
144 examples.
145
Mark Dickinsoncddcf442009-01-24 21:46:33 +0000146- Issue #1672332: fix unpickling of subnormal floats, which was
147 producing a ValueError on some platforms.
148
Martin v. Löwisacbf4612009-01-24 16:19:45 +0000149- Issue #3881: Help Tcl to load even when started through the
150 unreadable local symlink to "Program Files" on Vista.
151
Martin v. Löwis59e47792009-01-24 14:10:07 +0000152- Issue #4710: Extract directories properly in the zipfile module;
153 allow adding directories to a zipfile.
154
Jesse Noller6fd47e22009-01-23 14:09:08 +0000155- Issue #3807: _multiprocessing build fails when configure is passed
156 --without-threads argument. When this occurs, _multiprocessing will
157 be disabled, and not compiled.
158
Antoine Pitrou08838b62009-01-21 00:55:13 +0000159- Issue #5008: When a file is opened in append mode with the new IO library,
160 do an explicit seek to the end of file (so that e.g. tell() returns the
161 file size rather than 0). This is consistent with the behaviour of the
162 traditional 2.x file object.
163
Vinay Sajip6268cbc2009-01-21 00:19:28 +0000164- Issue #5013: Fixed a bug in FileHandler which occurred when the delay
165 parameter was set.
166
Mark Dickinson8dd05142009-01-20 20:43:58 +0000167- Issue #4842: Always append a trailing 'L' when pickling longs using
168 pickle protocol 0. When reading, the 'L' is optional.
169
Brett Cannonafccd632009-01-20 02:21:27 +0000170- Add the importlib package.
171
Jesse Noller9a0fc972009-01-18 21:12:58 +0000172- Issue #4301: Patch the logging module to add processName support, remove
173 _check_logger_class from multiprocessing.
174
Jesse Noller1cbb17a2009-01-18 19:45:18 +0000175- Issue #3325: Remove python2.x try: except: imports for old cPickle from
Vinay Sajip6268cbc2009-01-21 00:19:28 +0000176 multiprocessing.
Jesse Nollerf70a5382009-01-18 19:44:02 +0000177
Benjamin Peterson9953a8d2009-01-17 04:15:01 +0000178- Issue #4959: inspect.formatargspec now works for keyword only arguments
179 without defaults.
180
Jesse Noller6214edd2009-01-19 16:23:53 +0000181- Issue #3321: _multiprocessing.Connection() doesn't check handle; added checks
182 for *nix machines for negative handles and large int handles. Without this check
183 it is possible to segfault the interpreter.
184
Jesse Nollerb0516a62009-01-18 03:11:38 +0000185- Issue #4449: AssertionError in mp_benchmarks.py, caused by an underlying issue
186 in sharedctypes.py.
187
188- Issue #1225107: inspect.isclass() returned True for instances with a custom
189 __getattr__.
190
Gregory P. Smithde3369f2009-01-12 04:50:11 +0000191- Issue #3826 and #4791: The socket module now closes the underlying socket
192 appropriately when it is being used via socket.makefile() objects
193 rather than delaying the close by waiting for garbage collection to do it.
194
Raymond Hettingerb8baf632009-01-14 02:20:07 +0000195- Issue #1696199: Add collections.Counter() for rapid and convenient
196 counting.
197
Antoine Pitrou308705e2009-01-10 16:22:51 +0000198- Issue #3860: GzipFile and BZ2File now support the context manager protocol.
199
Thomas Heller5e4e4272009-01-08 09:34:20 +0000200- Issue #4867: Fixed a crash in ctypes when passing a string to a
201 function without defining argtypes.
202
Antoine Pitrou42db3ef2009-01-04 21:37:59 +0000203- Issue #4272: Add an optional argument to the GzipFile constructor to override
204 the timestamp in the gzip stream. The default value remains the current time.
205 The information can be used by e.g. gunzip when decompressing. Patch by
206 Jacques Frechet.
207
Mark Dickinson315a20a2009-01-04 21:34:18 +0000208- Restore Python 2.3 compatibility for decimal.py.
209
Guilherme Polo3f5f8222009-01-03 22:00:39 +0000210- Issue #3638: Remove functions from _tkinter module level that depend on
211 TkappObject to work with multiple threads.
212
Vinay Sajip6268cbc2009-01-21 00:19:28 +0000213- Issue #4718: Adapt the wsgiref package so that it actually works with
214 Python 3.x, in accordance with the `official amendments of the spec
Antoine Pitrou38a66ad2009-01-03 18:41:49 +0000215 <http://www.wsgi.org/wsgi/Amendments_1.0>`_.
216
Raymond Hettinger771ed762009-01-03 19:20:32 +0000217- Issue #4796: Added Decimal.from_float() and Context.create_decimal_from_float()
218 to the decimal module.
219
Georg Brandl3a9b0622009-01-03 22:07:57 +0000220- Fractions.from_float() no longer loses precision for integers too big to
221 cast as floats.
222
Mark Dickinsonf9236412009-01-02 23:23:21 +0000223- Issue #4812: add missing underscore prefix to some internal-use-only
224 constants in the decimal module. (Dec_0 becomes _Dec_0, etc.)
225
Georg Brandl3a9b0622009-01-03 22:07:57 +0000226- Issue 4790: The nsmallest() and nlargest() functions in the heapq module
227 did unnecessary work in the common case where no key function was specified.
228
Georg Brandlb1441c72009-01-03 22:33:39 +0000229- Issue #4795: inspect.isgeneratorfunction() returns False instead of None when
230 the function is not a generator.
231
Vinay Sajip6268cbc2009-01-21 00:19:28 +0000232- Issue #4702: Throwing a DistutilsPlatformError instead of IOError in case
233 no MSVC compiler is found under Windows. Original patch by Philip Jenvey.
Tarek Ziadé9df8ce32008-12-30 23:09:20 +0000234
Vinay Sajip6268cbc2009-01-21 00:19:28 +0000235- Issue #4646: distutils was choking on empty options arg in the setup
Tarek Ziadé4450dcf2008-12-29 22:38:38 +0000236 function. Original patch by Thomas Heller.
237
Martin v. Löwis1f1620e2008-12-29 16:27:13 +0000238- Issue #3767: Convert Tk object to string in tkColorChooser.
239
Martin v. Löwise354d782008-12-29 16:03:04 +0000240- Issue #3248: Allow placing ScrolledText in a PanedWindow.
241
Antoine Pitrou5acd41e2008-12-28 14:29:00 +0000242- Issue #4444: Allow assertRaises() to be used as a context handler, so that
243 the code under test can be written inline if more practical.
244
Georg Brandldb7b6b92009-01-01 15:53:14 +0000245- Issue #4739: Add pydoc help topics for symbols, so that e.g. help('@')
246 works as expected in the interactive environment.
247
Antoine Pitroudb5fe662008-12-27 15:50:40 +0000248- Issue #4756: zipfile.is_zipfile() now supports file-like objects. Patch by
249 Gabriel Genellina.
250
Antoine Pitrou180a3362008-12-14 16:36:46 +0000251- Issue #4574: reading an UTF16-encoded text file crashes if \r on 64-char
252 boundary.
253
Nick Coghlanf088e5e2008-12-14 11:50:48 +0000254- Issue #4223: inspect.getsource() will now correctly display source code
255 for packages loaded via zipimport (or any other conformant PEP 302
256 loader). Original patch by Alexander Belopolsky.
257
258- Issue #4201: pdb can now access and display source code loaded via
259 zipimport (or any other conformant PEP 302 loader). Original patch by
260 Alexander Belopolsky.
261
262- Issue #4197: doctests in modules loaded via zipimport (or any other PEP
263 302 conformant loader) will now work correctly in most cases (they
264 are still subject to the constraints that exist for all code running
265 from inside a module loaded via a PEP 302 loader and attempting to
266 perform IO operations based on __file__). Original patch by
267 Alexander Belopolsky.
268
269- Issues #4082 and #4512: Add runpy support to zipimport in a manner that
270 allows backporting to maintenance branches. Original patch by
271 Alexander Belopolsky.
272
Antoine Pitrou7c59bc62008-12-13 23:20:54 +0000273- Issue #4163: textwrap module: allow word splitting on a hyphen preceded by
274 a non-ASCII letter.
275
Lars Gustäbel43fcf3a2008-12-12 14:58:38 +0000276- Issue #4616: TarFile.utime(): Restore directory times on Windows.
277
Benjamin Peterson433f32c2008-12-12 01:25:05 +0000278- Issue #4021: tokenize.detect_encoding() now raises a SyntaxError when the
279 codec cannot be found. This is for compatibility with the builtin behavior.
280
Facundo Batista708d5812008-12-11 04:20:07 +0000281- Issue #4084: Fix max, min, max_mag and min_mag Decimal methods to
282 give correct results in the case where one argument is a quiet NaN
283 and the other is a finite number that requires rounding.
284
Skip Montanaroc1ce2862008-12-06 17:25:02 +0000285- Issue #4483: _dbm module now builds on systems with gdbm & gdbm_compat
286 libs.
287
Georg Brandlf9734072008-12-07 15:30:06 +0000288- Added the subprocess.check_call_output() convenience function to get output
289 from a subprocess on success or raise an exception on error.
290
291- Issue #1055234: cgi.parse_header(): Fixed parsing of header parameters to
292 support unusual filenames (such as those containing semi-colons) in
293 Content-Disposition headers.
294
295- Issue #4384: Added logging integration with warnings module using
296 captureWarnings(). This change includes a NullHandler which does nothing;
297 it will be of use to library developers who want to avoid the "No handlers
298 could be found for logger XXX" message which can appear if the library user
299 doesn't configure logging.
300
301- Issue #3741: DISTUTILS_USE_SDK set causes msvc9compiler.py to raise an
302 exception.
303
Georg Brandleee31162008-12-07 15:15:22 +0000304- Issue #4529: fix the parser module's validation of try-except-finally
305 statements.
306
307- Issue #4458: getopt.gnu_getopt() now recognizes a single "-" as an argument,
308 not a malformed option.
309
310- Added the subprocess.check_output() convenience function to get output
311 from a subprocess on success or raise an exception on error.
312
Amaury Forgeot d'Arcbc9d4742008-12-05 01:40:43 +0000313- Issue #4542: On Windows, binascii.crc32 still accepted str as binary input;
314 the corresponding tests now pass.
315
Amaury Forgeot d'Arcbc2ce572008-12-05 01:02:21 +0000316- Issue #4537: webbrowser.UnixBrowser would fail to open the browser because
317 it was calling the wrong open() function.
318
Fred Drake9a0a65b2008-12-04 19:24:50 +0000319- Issue #1055234: cgi.parse_header(): Fixed parsing of header parameters to
320 support unusual filenames (such as those containing semi-colons) in
321 Content-Disposition headers.
322
Matthias Klose2c7e3ee2009-01-10 17:08:25 +0000323- Issue #4861: ctypes.util.find_library(): Robustify. Fix library detection on
324 biarch systems. Try to rely on ldconfig only, without using objdump and gcc.
325
Antoine Pitrou2a013ea2008-12-27 20:39:28 +0000326Tools/Demos
327-----------
328
329- Issue #4677: add two list comprehension tests to pybench.
330
Georg Brandlb1441c72009-01-03 22:33:39 +0000331
332Build
333-----
334
Martin v. Löwise97637d2009-01-11 09:45:11 +0000335- Issue #4895: Use _strdup on Windows CE.
336
Georg Brandlb1441c72009-01-03 22:33:39 +0000337- Issue #4472: "configure --enable-shared" now works on OSX
338
339- Issues #4728 and #4060: WORDS_BIGEDIAN is now correct in Universal builds.
340
341- Issue #4389: Add icon to the uninstall entry in "add-and-remove-programs".
342
343- Issue #4289: Remove Cancel button from AdvancedDlg.
344
345- Issue #1656675: Register a drop handler for .py* files on Windows.
346
347- Issue #4120: Exclude manifest from extension modules in VS2008.
348
349- Issue #4091: Install pythonxy.dll in system32 again.
350
351- Issue #4018: Disable "for me" installations on Vista.
352
353- Issue #3758: Add ``patchcheck`` build target to .PHONY.
354
355- Issue #4204: Fixed module build errors on FreeBSD 4.
356
357
358C-API
359-----
360
361- Issue #4720: The format for PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords can begin with '|'.
362
363- Issue #3632: from the gdb debugger, the 'pyo' macro can now be called when
364 the GIL is released, or owned by another thread.
365
366- Issue #4122: On Windows, fix a compilation error when using the
367 Py_UNICODE_ISSPACE macro in an extension module.
368
369
Mark Dickinsone675f082008-12-11 21:56:00 +0000370Extension Modules
371-----------------
372
Mark Dickinson29500f62009-01-15 15:36:10 +0000373- Issue #4397: Fix occasional test_socket failure on OS X.
374
Martin v. Löwisa9b54c72009-01-11 09:30:50 +0000375- Issue #4279: Fix build of parsermodule under Cygwin.
376
Antoine Pitroubcd5cbe2009-01-08 21:17:16 +0000377- Issue #4751: hashlib now releases the GIL when hashing large buffers
378 (with a hardwired threshold of 2048 bytes), allowing better parallelization
379 on multi-CPU systems. Contributed by Lukas Lueg (ebfe) and Victor Stinner.
380
Martin v. Löwis5c88d812009-01-02 20:47:48 +0000381- Issue #4051: Prevent conflict of UNICODE macros in cPickle.
382
Antoine Pitrou31f30b12009-01-02 17:34:35 +0000383- Issue #4738: Each zlib object now has a separate lock, allowing to compress
384 or decompress several streams at once on multi-CPU systems. Also, the GIL
385 is now released when computing the CRC of a large buffer. Patch by ebfe.
386
Georg Brandlb1441c72009-01-03 22:33:39 +0000387- Issue #4228: Pack negative values the same way as 2.4 in struct's L format.
388
Martin v. Löwis05bfe1f2008-12-29 18:21:47 +0000389- Issue #1040026: Fix os.times result on systems where HZ is incorrect.
390
Mark Dickinsone675f082008-12-11 21:56:00 +0000391- Issues #3167, #3682: Fix test_math failures for log, log10 on Solaris,
392 OpenBSD.
Amaury Forgeot d'Arcefae8c42008-11-21 23:08:09 +0000393
Antoine Pitrou3ad3a0d2008-12-18 17:08:32 +0000394- Issue #4583: array.array would not always prohibit resizing when a buffer
395 has been exported, resulting in an interpreter crash when accessing the
396 buffer.
397
Martin v. Löwis841edad2008-11-30 10:36:49 +0000398
Brett Cannon7317c1e2008-11-25 19:19:17 +0000399Docs
400----
401
Georg Brandl52b92cc2008-05-25 09:43:03 +0000402
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000403**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**