blob: 0bb698b44b43f61bc5f5318c62a12c57196ff0eb [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
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000015- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000016 (fixes bug #1119418).
17
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000018- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
19
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000020- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
21 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
22
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000023- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
24 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
25 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
26
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000027- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
28
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000029- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
30 reference counts in some error exit cases.
31
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000032- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
33 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
34 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
35 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
36 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
37 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
38 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
39 realloc.
40
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000041- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
42 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
43
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000044- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
45 like their int counterparts.
46
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000047- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
48 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
49 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
50 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
51 for a longer write-up of the problem).
52
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000053- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
54 serializing floats.
55
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000056- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
57 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
58 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
59
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000060- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
61 278.
62
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000063- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
64 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
65 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
66 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
67 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
68 PyNumber_*().
69 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
70
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000071- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
72 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
73 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
74 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
75
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000076- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
77 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
78 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
79 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
80 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
81
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000082- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
83 disabled caused a crash.
84
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000085- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
86 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
87
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000088- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000089 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
90
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000091- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
92
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000093- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000094 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
95 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
96 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000097
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000098- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
99
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000100- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
101 returning None.
102
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000103- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000104 ('\') with a specific error message.
105
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000106- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
107
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000108- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
109 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
110
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000111- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000112 an ferror() call.
113
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000114- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
115 list.sort().
116
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000117- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
118 (2+3) --> (5).
119
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000120- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
121
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000122- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
123 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000124
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000125- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
126 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
127 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
128
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000129- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
130 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
131 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
132
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000133Extension Modules
134-----------------
135
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000136- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
137
138- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
139 line without newlines.
140
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000141- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
142 on Windows.
143
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000144- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
145 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
146
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000147- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
148 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
149 for large or negative values.
150
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000151- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000152 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000153
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000154- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
155
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000156- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
157 if available on the platform.
158
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000159- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
160 available on the platform.
161
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000162- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
163 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
164
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000165- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
166
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000167- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
168 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
169 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
170
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000171- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
172
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000173- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
174 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
175
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000176- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000177 file size.
178
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000179- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
180
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000181- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
182 {remove_history,replace_history}
183
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000184- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
185 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000186
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000187- stat_float_times is now True.
188
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000189- array.array objects are now picklable.
190
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000191- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
192 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
193
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000194- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
195 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
196 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
197
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000198- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
199 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000200
201Library
202-------
203
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000204- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
205
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000206- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
207 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
208
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000209- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
210 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
211 match the Content-Length header.
212
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000213- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
214
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000215- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
216 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
217 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
218
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000219- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
220
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000221- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
222
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000223- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
224 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
225
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000226- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
227 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
228 Tkdnd.
229
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000230- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
231 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
232
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000233- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
234 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
235
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000236- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000237 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
238
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000239- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
240 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
241
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000242- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
243 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
244
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000245- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000246 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000247
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000248- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
249
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000250- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
251 error messages.
252
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000253- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
254
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000255- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
256 Bug #1224621.
257
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000258- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
259 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
260 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
261 terminates by raising StopIteration.
262
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000263- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
264
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000265- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
266 component of the path.
267
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000268- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
269 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
270 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
271 class at all.
272
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000273- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
274 files to PyPI.
275
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000276- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
277 them to PyPI.
278
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000279- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
280 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
281 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
282 work as expected.
283
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000284- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
285 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
286
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000287- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000288 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
289
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000290- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
291
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000292- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
293 to build.
294
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000295- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
296 symbolic links on Windows.
297
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000298- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000299 profile.py if available.
300
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000301- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
302
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000303- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
304 in LWPCookieJar.
305
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000306- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
307
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000308- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
309
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000310- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
311
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000312- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
313
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000314- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
315
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000316- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
317
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000318- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
319
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000320- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
321
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000322- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
323 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
324 be exploited in various ways.
325
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000326- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
327
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000328- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
329
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000330- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
331
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000332- Enhancements to the csv module:
333
334 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000335 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000336 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000337 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
338 reporting.
339 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
340 dictates.
341 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000342 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000343 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000344 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
345 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000346 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
347 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000348 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000349 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
350 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
351 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
352 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
353 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
354 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
355 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
356 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
357 without first creating a dialect class.
358 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
359 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
360 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000361 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000362 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
363 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000364 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
365 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
366 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
367 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000368 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
369 This has been fixed.
370
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000371- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
372 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
373 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
374 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
375
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000376- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
377
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000378- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
379 (Bug #951915).
380
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000381- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
382 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
383 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000384 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000385
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000386- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
387
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000388- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
389 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
390
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000391- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
392
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000393- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
394
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000395- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
396
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000397- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
398
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000399- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
400
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000401- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
402 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
403 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
404
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000405- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000406 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000407
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000408- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
409 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
410 tokenizer with very long source lines.
411
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000412- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
413 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
414
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000415- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
416 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000417
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000418- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
419 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
420
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000421- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
422 correctly.
423
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000424- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
425 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
426 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
427 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
428 between two lines.
429
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000430
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000431Build
432-----
433
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000434- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
435 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
436
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000437- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
438 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
439
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000440- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
441 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
442 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000443 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000444
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000445- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
446 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
447 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
448
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000449- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
450
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000451- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
452 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
453
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000454- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
455 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
456 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
457 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
458 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
459 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
460 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
461 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
462
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000463- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
464 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
465 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
466 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
467
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000468
469C API
470-----
471
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000472- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
473
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000474- Removed PyRange_New().
475
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000476
477Tests
478-----
479
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000480- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000481
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000482
483Documentation
484-------------
485
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000486- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
487
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000488- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
489
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000490- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
491
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000492- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
493
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000494- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
495
496- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
497
498- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
499
500- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
501
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000502- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
503 Closes bug #1166582.
504
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000505- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
506 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
507 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
508
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000509Mac
510---
511
512
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000513New platforms
514-------------
515
516- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
517
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000518
519Tools/Demos
520-----------
521
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000522- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
523 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
524 source files that need an encoding declaration.
525 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
526
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000527- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
528
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000529- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000530
531
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000532What's New in Python 2.4 final?
533===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000534
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000535*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000536
537Core and builtins
538-----------------
539
540- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
541 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
542 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
543
544
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000545What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
546==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000547
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000548*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000549
550Core and builtins
551-----------------
552
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000553- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
554 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
555 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
556
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000557
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000558Library
559-------
560
561- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
562 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
563 raised is re-raised.
564
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000565- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
566 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
567
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000568- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
569 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
570 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
571 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
572 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
573 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
574 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
575 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
576 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
577 by the slice are recomputed now.
578
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000579- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000580
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000581Build
582-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000583
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000584- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
585 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
586 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000587
588C API
589-----
590
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000591- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
592
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000593
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000594What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
595================================
596
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000597*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000598
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000599License
600-------
601
602The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
603is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
604changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
605Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
606intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
607durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
608the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
609License::
610
611 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
612
613says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
614to Python 2.1.1.
615
616The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
617License Version 2.
618
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000619Core and builtins
620-----------------
621
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000622- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
623 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
624 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
625 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
626 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
627 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
628 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
629 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
630 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
631 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
632
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000633- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000634
635Extension Modules
636-----------------
637
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000638- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
639 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
640 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
641 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000642
643Library
644-------
645
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000646- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
647 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
648 returned.
649
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000650- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
651
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000652- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
653 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
654
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000655- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
656
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000657- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
658 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000659
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000660- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
661
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000662- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
663
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000664- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000665 the source code is updated and reloaded.
666
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000667Build
668-----
669
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000670- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000671
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000672What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
673================================
674
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000675*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000676
677Core and builtins
678-----------------
679
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000680- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000681 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
682
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000683- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
684 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
685 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
686 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
687
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000688- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
689 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
690
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000691- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
692 constant.
693
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000694- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
695 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
696 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
697 large), and to anomalies such as
698 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
699 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
700 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
701 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000702
703Extension modules
704-----------------
705
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000706- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
707 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000708 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
709 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
710 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000711
712Library
713-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000714
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000715- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000716 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000717 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
718 --swig-cpp.
719
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000720- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
721 it is set.
722
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000723- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000724
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000725- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
726 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
727 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
728 Closes bug #1039270.
729
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000730- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000731
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000732 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000733 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
734 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
735 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
736 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
737 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
738 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
739 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
740 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
741 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
742 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
743 + Updates to documentation.
744
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000745- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
746 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
747 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
748 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
749
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000750- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000751
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000752- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
753 applications should use the getmember function.
754
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000755- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
756
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000757- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
758 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
759 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
760 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
761 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
762 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
763 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
764 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
765 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
766
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000767- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
768 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000769 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000770
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000771- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
772 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
773 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
774 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
775 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
776 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
777 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
778 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000779
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000780- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
781 the new public features (of which there are many).
782
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000783- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000784 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
785 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
786 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
787 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000788 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000789
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000790- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
791
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000792- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
793 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
794 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
795 options.
796
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000797- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
798 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
799 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
800 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
801 conditions under which non-string values work.
802
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000803Build
804-----
805
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000806- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
807 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
808 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
809
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000810- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
811 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
812 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
813 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
814 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000815
816C API
817-----
818
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000819- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
820 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
821
822- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
823
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000824- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
825 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
826 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
827 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
828 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
829 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
830 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
831 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
832 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
833
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000834- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
835
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000836- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
837 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
838 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000839
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000840Tests
841-----
842
843- test__locale ported to unittest
844
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000845Mac
846---
847
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000848- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
849 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
850 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000851
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000852Tools/Demos
853-----------
854
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000855- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
856 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
857 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
858 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
859 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000860
861
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000862What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
863=================================
864
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000865*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000866
867Core and builtins
868-----------------
869
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000870- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000871 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
872
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000873- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
874 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
875 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
876 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
877 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
878 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
879 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
880 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000881 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
882 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
883 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
884 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
885 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000886
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000887- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
888 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
889 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
890 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
891 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
892
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000893- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
894
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000895- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
896 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
897
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000898- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
899 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
900 modified the list.
901
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000902- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
903 functions is now writable.
904
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000905- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
906 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
907 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
908 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
909
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000910- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
911 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
912 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
913 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
914 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000915
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000916- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
917 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
918
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000919Extension modules
920-----------------
921
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000922- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
923
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000924- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
925 data.
926
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000927- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
928 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
929 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
930 supposed to have been truncated away.
931
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000932- Added socket.socketpair().
933
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000934- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
935 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
936
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000937- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000938 versions of Python, have now been removed.
939
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000940Library
941-------
942
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000943- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000944 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000945
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000946- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
947 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
948
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000949- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
950 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
951
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000952- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
953
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000954- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
955 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000956
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000957- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
958 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
959
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000960- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
961
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000962- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
963
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000964- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
965
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000966- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
967 Percivall.
968
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000969- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
970 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
971
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000972- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
973 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
974 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000975 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000976
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000977- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
978 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
979 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
980 and exponent.
981
982- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
983
984- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +0000985 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000986 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
987
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000988- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
989 to the readline module.
990
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000991- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000992 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
993 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000994
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000995- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
996 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
997 contains symlinks.
998
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000999- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1000 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1001
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001002- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1003 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1004 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1005
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001006- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1007 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1008 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1009 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1010 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1011 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1012 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1013 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1014 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1015 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1016 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1017 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1018 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1019
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001020- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1021
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001022Tools/Demos
1023-----------
1024
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001025- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1026 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1027
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001028- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1029
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001030Build
1031-----
1032
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001033- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1034 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1035 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1036 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1037 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1038 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1039 plans to do so.
1040
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001041- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1042 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1043
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001044- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1045 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1046
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001047- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1048 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1049
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001050- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1051 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1052
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001053- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1054 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1055
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001056C API
1057-----
1058
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001059..
1060
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001061Documentation
1062-------------
1063
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001064- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1065 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1066
1067- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1068 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1069 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001070
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001071New platforms
1072-------------
1073
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001074- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1075
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001076Tests
1077-----
1078
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001079..
1080
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001081Windows
1082-------
1083
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001084- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1085 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1086 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1087 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1088 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1089 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1090 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1091 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1092 the problem.
1093
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001094Mac
1095---
1096
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001097..
1098
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001099
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001100What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1101=================================
1102
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001103*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001104
1105Core and builtins
1106-----------------
1107
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001108- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1109 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1110 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1111 sensitive code.
1112
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001113- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001114 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001115
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001116 @staticmethod
1117 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001118
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001119 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001120
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001121- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1122 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1123 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1124 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1125 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1126 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1127 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1128 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1129 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1130 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1131 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1132
1133 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1134 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1135 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1136 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1137 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1138 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1139 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1140
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001141- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1142 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1143
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001144- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001145 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001146
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001147- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001148 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001149 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1150
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001151- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001152 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1153 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1154
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001155- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1156 types that support garbage collection.
1157
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001158- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1159
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001160- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1161 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1162 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1163 Jython.
1164
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001165- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1166
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001167- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1168 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1169
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001170- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1171 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1172 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001173
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001174- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1175 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1176 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1177
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001178Extension modules
1179-----------------
1180
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001181- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1182
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001183Library
1184-------
1185
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001186- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1187 TIS-620
1188
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001189- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1190 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1191 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1192 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1193 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1194 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1195 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1196 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1197 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1198 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1199
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001200- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1201
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001202- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1203 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1204 same as when the argument is omitted).
1205 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1206
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001207- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1208
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001209- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1210 schemes are offered.
1211
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001212- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1213
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001214- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1215 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1216 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1217
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001218- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1219
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001220- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1221 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1222
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001223- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1224 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1225 when dummy_threading is being used.
1226
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001227- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1228 from a tarfile.
1229
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001230- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001231 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001232
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001233- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1234 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1235 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1236 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1237
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001238- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1239 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1240
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001241- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1242 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1243 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1244 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1245 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1246 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1247 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1248 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1249 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1250 by some other method in progress).
1251
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001252- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1253 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1254 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001255
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001256- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1257
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001258- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1259 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1260 AM Kuchling.
1261
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001262- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1263 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1264 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1265
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001266- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1267 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1268 instead of unsigned.
1269
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001270- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001271 no longer part of the public API.
1272
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001273- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1274 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1275 string methods of the same name).
1276
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001277- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001278 SF patch 945642.
1279
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001280- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1281
1282 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1283
1284 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1285 DocTestSuites.
1286
1287- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1288 that provide thread-local data.
1289
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001290- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1291 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1292
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001293- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1294
1295- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1296 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1297 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1298
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001299- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1300
1301 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1302 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1303 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001304
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001305 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1306 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1307 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1308 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1309
1310 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1311 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1312
1313 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1314 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1315 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1316 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1317
1318 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1319 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1320 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1321 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1322 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1323
1324 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1325 wrapping help output.
1326
1327 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1328 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1329 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001330
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001331C API
1332-----
1333
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001334- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1335 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1336 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1337 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1338 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1339 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1340 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1341 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1342 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1343 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1344 its visible semantics have not changed.
1345
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001346- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1347 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1348
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001349Documentation
1350-------------
1351
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001352- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001353
1354 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001355 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001356
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001357 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001358
1359 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1360
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001361- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001362
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001363Tests
1364-----
1365
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001366- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001367 platforms that use the Makefile.
1368
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001369- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1370 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1371 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1372
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001373
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001374What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1375=================================
1376
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001377*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001378
1379Core and builtins
1380-----------------
1381
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001382- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1383 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1384 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1385 objects now (one object instead of three).
1386
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001387- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1388 Windows DLLs.
1389
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001390- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1391 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001392
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001393- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1394 a new .pyc magic.
1395
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001396- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1397 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1398 be there.
1399
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001400- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1401 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1402 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1403
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001404- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1405 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1406 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1407
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001408- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1409
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001410- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1411 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1412 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001413
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001414- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1415 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1416
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001417- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1418
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001419- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001420 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001421
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001422- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1423
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001424- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1425
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001426- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1427 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1428
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001429- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1430 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1431 Fixes bug #858016 .
1432
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001433- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1434 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1435 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1436
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001437- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1438 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1439 improves their performance (about 35%).
1440
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001441- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1442 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1443 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1444
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001445- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1446 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1447 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1448 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1449
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001450- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1451 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001452 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001453 length is not known).
1454
1455- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1456 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001457 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1458 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001459 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1460
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001461- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1462 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1463
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001464- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1465 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1466 keyword arguments.
1467
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001468- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1469 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1470 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1471
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001472- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1473 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1474 cases.
1475
1476- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1477 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1478 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1479 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1480 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1481 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1482 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1483 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1484 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1485 a release build.
1486
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001487- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1488 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1489
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001490- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001491 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001492
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001493- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1494 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1495 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1496 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1497 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1498 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1499 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1500 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1501 destroyed.
1502
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001503- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1504 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1505 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1506 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1507 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1508 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1509 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1510 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1511
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001512- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1513 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1514 character other than a space.
1515
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001516- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1517 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1518 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1519 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1520 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1521 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1522 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1523 attributes with the same name.
1524
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001525- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1526 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1527 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1528 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1529 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1530 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1531 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1532 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1533 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1534 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1535 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1536 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1537 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1538 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001539
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001540- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1541 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1542 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1543 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1544 This has been repaired.
1545
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001546- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1547
1548- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1549
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001550- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1551 over a sequence.
1552
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001553- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001554 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001555
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001556- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1557
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001558- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1559 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1560 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1561 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1562 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1563 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1564 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1565 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1566
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001567- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1568 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1569 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1570
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001571- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1572 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1573 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1574 freelist.
1575
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001576- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1577 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1578
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001579- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1580 number.
1581
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001582- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1583 a TypeError exception.
1584
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001585- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1586 820195.
1587
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001588- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1589 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1590 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1591
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001592- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001593 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1594 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001595
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001596- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1597 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1598 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1599
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001600- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1601 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001602 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001603
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001604- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001605 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1606 the first call.
1607
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001608
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001609Extension modules
1610-----------------
1611
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001612- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1613 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1614
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001615- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1616 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1617 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1618 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1619 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1620 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1621 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001622
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001623- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1624
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001625- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1626
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001627- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1628 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1629
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001630- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1631 fewer false positives.
1632
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001633- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1634 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1635
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001636- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001637 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1638
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001639- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001640 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001641 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001642 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1643 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001644
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001645- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1646 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1647 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1648 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1649
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001650- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1651 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1652 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1653 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1654 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1655 #897625.
1656
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001657- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1658 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1659
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001660- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1661 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1662 and pops on either side of the deque.
1663
1664- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1665 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1666
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001667- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1668 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1669 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1670 other functions that expect a function argument.
1671
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001672- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1673
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001674- os.getsid was added.
1675
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001676- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1677 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1678 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1679
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001680- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1681
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001682- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1683
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001684- readline.clear_history was added.
1685
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001686- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1687
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001688- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1689
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001690- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1691
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001692- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1693
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001694- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1695
1696- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1697
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001698- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1699
1700- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1701
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001702- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1703 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1704 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1705
1706- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1707 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1708 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1709 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1710 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1711 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1712 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1713
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001714- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1715 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1716 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1717 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001718
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001719- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001720 iterators from a single iterable.
1721
1722- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1723 of raising a TypeError exception.
1724
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001725- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1726 as parameter.
1727
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001728Library
1729-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001730
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001731- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1732
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001733- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1734 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1735 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001736
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001737- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1738 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1739 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001740
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001741- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001742
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001743- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1744 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001745
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001746- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1747 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1748
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001749- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1750
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001751- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001752 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001753
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001754- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001755 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001756
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001757- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1758
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001759- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1760 on cygwin and mingw32.
1761
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001762- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1763
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001764- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1765 module.
1766
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001767- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1768 installation scheme for all platforms.
1769
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001770- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001771 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001772
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001773- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1774 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1775 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1776
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001777- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1778 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1779 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1780
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001781- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1782
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001783- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1784
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001785- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1786 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1787
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001788- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1789 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1790 type pattern with the same value exists.
1791
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001792- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1793 when run from the command prompt).
1794
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001795- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1796 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1797
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001798- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1799 default sort).
1800
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001801- Added global runctx function to profile module
1802
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001803- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1804
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001805- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1806
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001807- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1808
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001809- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001810 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1811 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1812 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1813 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1814 accordingly.
1815
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001816- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1817 decoding standards.
1818
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001819- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1820 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1821 called for all requests.
1822
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001823- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1824 they are passed to the compiler.
1825
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001826- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1827 indent, width and depth.
1828
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001829- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1830 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1831
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001832- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1833 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1834
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001835- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1836
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001837- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1838
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001839- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1840
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001841- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1842 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1843
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001844- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001845 for better performance.
1846
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001847- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001848
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001849- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1850 a string).
1851
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001852- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1853
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001854- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1855
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001856- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1857
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001858- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1859
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001860- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1861 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1862 list of fieldnames.
1863
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001864- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1865 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1866
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001867- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1868
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001869- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1870 empty lists.
1871
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001872- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1873 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1874 and shelves.
1875
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001876- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1877 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1878
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001879- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001880 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1881 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001882
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001883- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1884 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001885 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001886
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001887- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001888 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1889 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1890
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001891- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1892 and removed in Py2.4.
1893
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001894- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1895
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001896- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1897
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001898Tools/Demos
1899-----------
1900
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001901- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1902 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1903
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001904- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1905
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001906- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1907 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1908 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1909 destination in situations where both files are given.
1910
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001911- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1912 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1913 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1914 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1915
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001916- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1917
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001918- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1919 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1920 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1921 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1922 now.
1923
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001924- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1925 in effect
1926
1927- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1928 C-c C-h
1929
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001930- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1931 -d option was given.
1932
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001933Build
1934-----
1935
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001936- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1937 build under OS X.
1938
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001939- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1940 --enable-profiling.
1941
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001942- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1943 is configured --with-tsc.
1944
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001945- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1946 on AMD64.
1947
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001948- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1949 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1950
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001951- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1952 removed.
1953
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001954- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1955 supported (see PEP 11).
1956
1957- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1958
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001959- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1960
1961- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1962 (see PEP 11).
1963
1964- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1965 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1966
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001967C API
1968-----
1969
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001970- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1971 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1972 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1973
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001974- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1975 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1976 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1977 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1978
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001979- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1980 generator objects.
1981
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001982- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1983 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001984 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1985 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001986
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001987- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1988 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1989
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001990- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1991 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1992 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1993 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1994 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1995
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001996- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1997 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1998 about 10% faster.
1999
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002000- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2001 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2002
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002003- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2004 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2005 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2006 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2007
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002008Windows
2009-------
2010
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002011- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2012 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2013 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2014 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2015
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002016- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2017 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2018 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2019
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002020
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002021What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2022===============================
2023
2024*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2025
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002026IDLE
2027----
2028
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002029- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2030 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2031 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2032 context-menu actions.
2033
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002034- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2035 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2036 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2037 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2038 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2039 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2040 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2041 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2042 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2043
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002044
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002045What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2046=============================================
2047
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002048*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002049
2050Core and builtins
2051-----------------
2052
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002053- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002054 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002055 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2056
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002057Extension modules
2058-----------------
2059
2060- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2061 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2062 than once. This has been fixed.
2063
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002064- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2065 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2066 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2067 call.
2068
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002069- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2070
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002071Library
2072-------
2073
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002074- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2075 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2076
2077- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2078 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2079 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2080 restored.
2081
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002082IDLE
2083----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002084
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002085- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002086
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002087Build
2088-----
2089
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002090- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2091 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2092
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002093C API
2094-----
2095
2096Windows
2097-------
2098
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002099- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2100 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2101
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002102- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2103
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002104Mac
2105---
2106
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002107- Various fixes to pimp.
2108
2109- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2110
2111- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2112 more problems than it solves.
2113
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002114
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002115What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2116=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002117
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002118*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2119
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002120Core and builtins
2121-----------------
2122
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002123- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2124 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2125
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002126- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2127 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002128 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002129
2130- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2131 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2132 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002133 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002134
2135- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2136 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002137
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002138- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2139 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2140 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2141
2142- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002143 770247.
2144
2145- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002146
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002147Extension modules
2148-----------------
2149
2150- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2151 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2152
2153- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2154
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002155- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2156
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002157- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2158 contained within the _strptime module.
2159
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002160- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2161 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2162
2163- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002164 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2165
2166- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2167 the find_class attribute, if present.
2168
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002169- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002170
2171 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2172 (SF bug 763298).
2173
2174 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002175 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2176 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2177 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002178
2179 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2180
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002181Library
2182-------
2183
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002184- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2185
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002186- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2187 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2188 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2189 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2190 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2191 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2192 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2193 or Tester().
2194
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002195- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2196 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2197 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2198 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2199 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2200 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2201 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2202 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2203 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002204
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002205 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002206
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002207- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2208 weren't before was an oversight.
2209
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002210- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2211 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2212
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002213- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2214 when there are no lines.
2215
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002216- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2217 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2218
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002219- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2220 to child processes.
2221
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002222- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2223
2224- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2225
2226- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2227 xmlrpclib.
2228
2229- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2230 responses.
2231
2232- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2233 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2234
2235- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2236 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2237 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2238
2239- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2240 used as patterns.
2241
2242- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2243 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2244 than Tk 8.3.
2245
2246- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2247
2248- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002249
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002250Tools/Demos
2251-----------
2252
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002253- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2254
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002255- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2256
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002257- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002258
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002259Build
2260-----
2261
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002262- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2263
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002264- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2265
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002266- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2267 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002268
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002269- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2270 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2271 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002272
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002273C API
2274-----
2275
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002276- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2277 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2278
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002279Windows
2280-------
2281
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002282- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2283 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2284 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2285 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2286 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2287 Python exception ::
2288
2289 thread.error: can't start new thread
2290
2291 is raised now.
2292
2293- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2294 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2295 instead of from DLL teardown.
2296
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002297Mac
2298---
2299
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002300- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002301 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002302 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2303 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2304 the executable in the bundle.
2305
2306- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002307
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002308- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2309
2310- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2311 on Panther.
2312
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002313What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2314================================
2315
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002316*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002317
2318Core and builtins
2319-----------------
2320
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002321- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2322 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2323 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2324 with the -i option.
2325
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002326- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2327 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2328
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002329- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2330 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2331
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002332- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2333 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2334 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2335 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2336 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2337 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2338 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2339 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2340 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2341 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2342 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2343 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2344 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002345
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002346- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2347 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2348 embedded in a lambda expression.
2349
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002350- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2351 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2352 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2353 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2354 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2355
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002356- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2357 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2358 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2359
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002360- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2361 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2362
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002363- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2364 It's writable again.
2365
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002366- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2367 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2368 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002369 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002370
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002371- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2372 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2373 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2374
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002375Extension modules
2376-----------------
2377
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002378- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2379 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2380
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002381- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2382 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2383 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2384 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2385
2386- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2387 collection.
2388
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002389- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2390 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2391 unique within a single program run.
2392
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002393- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2394 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2395
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002396- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2397 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2398
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002399- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2400 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002401
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002402- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2403
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002404- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2405 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2406
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002407- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2408 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2409 for many BSD-derived systems.
2410
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002411
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002412Library
2413-------
2414
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002415- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2416 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2417 primary ones:
2418
2419 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2420 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2421 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2422
2423 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2424 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2425 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2426 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2427 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2428 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2429
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002430- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2431 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2432 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2433 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2434 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2435 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2436 argument.
2437
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002438- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2439 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2440 in the archive.
2441
2442- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2443 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2444
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002445- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2446 569574).
2447
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002448- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2449 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2450 no more.
2451
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002452- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2453 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2454 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2455 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2456 code coverage.
2457
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002458- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2459 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2460 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002461 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2462 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002463
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002464- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2465 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2466 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002467 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002468
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002469- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2470
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002471- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2472 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2473 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2474 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2475
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002476- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2477 handling.
2478
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002479- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2480 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2481
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002482- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2483 in socket.py.
2484
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002485- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2486
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002487- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2488 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2489 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2490 opener with proxy support.
2491
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002492- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2493
2494- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2495
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002496Tools/Demos
2497-----------
2498
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002499- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2500
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002501- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2502
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002503- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2504 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002505
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002506- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2507 files.
2508
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002509Build
2510-----
2511
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002512- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002513 different root directory.
2514
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002515C API
2516-----
2517
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002518- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2519 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2520 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2521 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2522 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2523 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2524 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2525 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2526 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2527 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2528
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002529- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2530 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2531 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2532 from Python.
2533
2534
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002535New platforms
2536-------------
2537
2538None this time.
2539
2540Tests
2541-----
2542
2543- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2544 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2545
2546Windows
2547-------
2548
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002549- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2550
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002551- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2552 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2553 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2554 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2555 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2556 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2557 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2558 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2559 that's what it's for.
2560
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002561Mac
2562---
2563
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002564- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2565 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2566 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2567 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002568- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2569 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2570- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002571
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002572SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2573------------------------------------
2574
2575430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2576598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2577622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2578661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2579683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2580697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2581713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2582724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2583727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2584729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2585730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2586731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2587732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2588733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2589735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2590740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2591744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2592745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2593747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2594749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2595751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2596753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2597755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2598757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2599760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2600
2601
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002602What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2603================================
2604
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002605*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002606
2607Core and builtins
2608-----------------
2609
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002610- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2611 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2612
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002613- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2614 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2615 and cannot be strings).
2616
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002617- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2618 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2619 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2620 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2621
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002622- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2623 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2624 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2625 Python itself.
2626
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002627- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2628 the referenced object, if it has one.
2629
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002630- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2631 the thread started at
2632 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2633
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002634- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2635 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2636 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2637 placed on a list index.
2638
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002639- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2640 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2641 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2642 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2643
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002644- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2645 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2646 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2647 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2648 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2649 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2650 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2651
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002652- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2653 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2654 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2655 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2656 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2657
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002658- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2659 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002660
2661- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2662 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2663 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2664 #693195.)
2665
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002666- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2667 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002668
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002669- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002670 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002671 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2672 interpreter executions, would fail.
2673
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002674- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002675 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002676 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002677
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002678Extension modules
2679-----------------
2680
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002681- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2682 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2683 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2684 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2685
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002686- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2687 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2688
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002689- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2690 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2691 and Greg Chapman.)
2692
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002693- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2694 recursively.
2695
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002696- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002697 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2698 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2699 leaks.
2700
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002701- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2702
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002703- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2704 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2705 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2706 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2707 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2708 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2709 #705836.
2710
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002711- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002712 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2713
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002714- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2715 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2716 See SF bug #692416.
2717
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002718- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2719 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2720
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002721- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2722 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2723 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002724
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002725- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002726 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2727 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2728
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002729- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2730 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2731 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2732 timeouts to work properly.
2733
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002734Library
2735-------
2736
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002737- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2738 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2739 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2740 future release.
2741
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002742- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2743 for querying platform dependent features.
2744
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002745- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002746
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002747- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2748 pickle protocol versions.
2749
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002750- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2751 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2752 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2753
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002754- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2755
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002756- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2757 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2758 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2759 modules.
2760
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002761- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2762 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2763 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2764
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002765- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2766 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2767
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002768- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2769 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2770 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2771
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002772- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002773 MS Office extensions.
2774
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002775- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2776 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2777
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002778- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2779 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2780
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002781- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2782 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2783 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2784 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2785 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2786 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2787
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002788- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2789 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2790 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002791
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002792- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2793 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2794 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2795
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002796- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2797
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002798- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2799 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2800 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2801
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002802Tools/Demos
2803-----------
2804
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002805- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2806 See the module docstring for details.
2807
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002808Build
2809-----
2810
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002811- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2812 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002813
2814C API
2815-----
2816
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002817- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2818
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002819- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2820 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2821 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2822
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002823- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2824 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002825
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002826 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2827 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2828 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002829
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002830- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002831 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2832
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002833- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2834 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2835 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002836
2837New platforms
2838-------------
2839
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002840None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002841
2842Tests
2843-----
2844
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002845- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2846 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002847
2848Windows
2849-------
2850
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002851- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2852 function.
2853
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002854- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2855 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002856
2857Mac
2858---
2859
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002860- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2861 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002862
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002863- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2864 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002865
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002866- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2867 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2868 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002869
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002870- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002871 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2872 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002873
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002874- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2875 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002876
2877
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002878What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2879=================================
2880
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002881*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002882
2883Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002884-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002885
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002886- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2887 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2888 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2889
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002890- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2891 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2892 (SF patch #664376.)
2893
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002894- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2895 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2896 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2897 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2898 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2899 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002900 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002901
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002902- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2903 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2904 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2905 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002906 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002907
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002908- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2909 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2910 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2911 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2912 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2913 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2914 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2915 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2916 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2917 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2918 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2919
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002920- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2921 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2922 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2923 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2924 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2925 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2926
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002927- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2928 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2929
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002930- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2931 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2932 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2933 case.)
2934
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002935- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2936 passed as unicode strings.
2937
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002938- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2939 See SF bug #683467.
2940
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002941- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2942 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2943
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002944- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2945
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002946- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2947
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002948- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2949 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2950 arguments.
2951
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002952- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2953 See SF bug #667147.
2954
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002955- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002956 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002957 See SF bug #676155.
2958
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002959- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002960 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002961 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2962 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2963 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2964 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2965 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2966 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002967
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002968Extension modules
2969-----------------
2970
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002971- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2972 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2973 tp_as_number pointer.
2974
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002975- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2976 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2977 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2978 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2979 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2980
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002981- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2982
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002983- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2984
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002985- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002986 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002987 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2988 patch #678531.)
2989
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002990- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2991 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2992
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002993- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2994 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2995
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002996- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2997
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002998- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2999 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3000 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3001
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003002- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3003
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003004- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3005 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3006
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003007- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003008
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003009- datetime changes:
3010
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003011 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3012
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003013 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3014 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3015 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3016 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3017 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3018 now.
3019
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003020 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003021 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3022 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003023
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003024 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003025 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003026 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3027 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3028 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3029 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003030
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003031 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3032 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3033 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003034 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3035
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003036 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3037 by a later example coded by Guido.
3038
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003039 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003040 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3041 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3042 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003043 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3044 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3045
3046 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3047 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3048 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3049 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3050 tzinfo subclass instance.
3051
3052 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3053 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3054 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3055 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3056 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3057 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3058 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3059 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003060
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003061 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3062 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3063 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3064 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3065 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003066 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3067
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003068 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003069
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003070 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3071 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3072 as a naive datetime object.
3073
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003074 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3075 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3076 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3077
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003078 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3079 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3080 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3081 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3082 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3083 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3084 comparison.
3085
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003086 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3087 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3088 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3089 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003090 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003091
3092 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003093
3094 and ::
3095
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003096 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3097
3098 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3099 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3100 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3101 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3102
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003103 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3104 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3105 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3106 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3107 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3108
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003109 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3110 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003111 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3112 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003113
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003114Library
3115-------
3116
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003117- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3118 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3119
3120- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3121 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3122 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3123 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3124 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3125 See PEP 307 for details.
3126
3127- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3128 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3129
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003130- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3131 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003132 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003133 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3134 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003135 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003136
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003137- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3138 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3139
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003140- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3141 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3142 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3143
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003144- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3145
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003146- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3147 exception.
3148
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003149- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3150 class.
3151
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003152- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3153 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3154 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3155
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003156- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3157 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3158
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003159- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003160 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3161 See SF bug #659228.
3162
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003163- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3164 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3165 See SF patch #651082.
3166
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003167- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003168
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003169- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3170 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3171
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003172- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003173 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003174
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003175- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3176 DOS paths from other platforms.
3177
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003178Tools/Demos
3179-----------
3180
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003181- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3182 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3183 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3184 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3185 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3186 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3187 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3188 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3189 example:
3190
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003191 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3192 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003193
3194 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3195
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003196
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003197Build
3198-----
3199
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003200- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3201 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3202 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003203 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3204
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003205 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3206
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003207- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3208 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3209 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3210 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3211 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3212 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3213 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3214 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3215 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3216
3217- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3218 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3219 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3220 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3221
3222- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3223 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3224
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003225C API
3226-----
3227
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003228- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3229 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003230
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003231- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3232 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3233 tp_as_number pointer.
3234
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003235- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3236 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3237 (SF #681367)
3238
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003239- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3240 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3241 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3242 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003243
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003244Tests
3245-----
3246
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003247- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003248 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3249 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3250 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3251 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3252 pydoc.)
3253
3254- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3255
3256- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003257
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003258Windows
3259-------
3260
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003261- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3262 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3263 time).
3264
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003265- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3266 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3267
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003268- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3269 release without strong cryptography.
3270
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003271- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003272 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003273
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003274- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3275 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3276
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003277Mac
3278---
3279
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003280- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3281 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003282
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003283- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3284 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3285 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003286
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003287- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3288 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003289
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003290- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3291 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3292 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3293 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003294
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003295- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003296 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3297 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3298 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003299
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003300
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003301What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003302=================================
3303
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003304*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003305
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003306Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003307--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003308
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003309- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3310
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003311- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3312 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003313 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003314 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003315 a different meaning than before.
3316
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003317- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003318 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003319 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003320
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003321- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003322 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003323 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003324
3325- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3326 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3327 and deallocation.
3328
3329- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3330 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3331
3332- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3333 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3334 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3335 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3336 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3337
3338- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3339 now detected by the garbage collector.
3340
3341- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3342 [SF bug 519621]
3343
3344- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3345 identifier.
3346
3347- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3348 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3349 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3350 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3351 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3352 [SF bug 563060]
3353
3354- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3355 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3356 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3357 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3358 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3359
3360- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3361 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3362 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3363
3364- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3365
3366- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3367 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3368 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3369 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3370 state of the slots would be lost.)
3371
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003372Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003373-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003374
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003375- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003376 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3377 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3378 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3379 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003380 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3381 Jython 2.1.
3382
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003383- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003384 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003385 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3386 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3387 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3388 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3389 these, see PEP 302.
3390
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003391- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3392 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3393 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3394
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003395- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3396 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3397 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3398
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003399- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3400 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3401 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3402
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003403- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3404 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3405 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3406 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3407 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3408 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3409 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3410 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3411 releases or implementations.
3412
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003413- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003414 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3415 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003416
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003417- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3418 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3419
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003420- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3421 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3422 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3423
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003424- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3425 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3426
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003427- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3428 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003429 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3430 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003431
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003432- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3433 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3434 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3435 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3436 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3437
3438 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3439 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3440 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3441 pattern.
3442
3443 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3444 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3445 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3446 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3447
3448 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3449 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3450 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3451 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3452 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3453 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3454
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003455- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3456 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3457 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3458 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3459 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3460 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3461 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3462 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003463
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003464- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3465 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3466 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3467 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3468 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003469 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3470 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3471 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3472 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3473 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3474 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3475 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003476
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003477- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3478 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3479
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003480- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3481 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3482 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3483 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3484 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3485 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3486 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3487 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3488 to Zack Weinberg!
3489
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003490- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3491 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3492 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3493 type. This has been fixed now.
3494
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003495- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3496 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3497 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3498
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003499- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3500 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3501 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3502 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3503 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3504 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3505 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3506 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003507 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003508
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003509- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3510 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3511 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003512
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003513- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3514 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3515 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3516 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3517 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3518 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3519 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3520 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003521 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003522 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3523 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3524
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003525- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3526 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3527 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3528 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3529 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3530 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3531 this.)
3532
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003533- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3534 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003535 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003536 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003537 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3538 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003539 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3540 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003541
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003542- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3543 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3544 currently running.
3545
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003546- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3547 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3548 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3549 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3550
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003551- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3552 as directory names.
3553
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003554- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3555 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3556
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003557- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3558 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3559
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003560- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003561 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3562 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003563
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003564- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3565 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3566 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3567 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3568 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3569
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003570- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3571 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3572 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3573 removed.
3574
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003575- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3576 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3577 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3578
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003579- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3580 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3581 to __debug__.
3582
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003583- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3584 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3585 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3586
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003587- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3588 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3589 deprecated now.
3590
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003591- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3592 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3593 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003594
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003595- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3596 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3597 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3598 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3599 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003600
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003601- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3602 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3603
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003604- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3605 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3606 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003607 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003608 is backward compatible.
3609
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003610- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3611 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3612 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3613 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3614 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3615
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003616- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3617 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3618 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3619 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3620 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3621 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003622
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003623- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3624 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3625
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003626- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3627 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3628
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003629- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3630 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3631 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3632 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3633 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3634
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003635- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3636 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3637 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3638
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003639- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003640 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3641
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003642- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3643 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3644 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003645
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003646- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3647 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3648
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003649- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3650 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3651 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3652
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003653- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3654
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003655Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003656-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003657
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003658- Added three operators to the operator module:
3659 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3660 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3661 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3662
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003663- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3664
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003665- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3666 archives.
3667
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003668- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3669 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3670 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3671
3672 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3673
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003674- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3675 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3676 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003677 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003678
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003679- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3680 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3681 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3682 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003683 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3684 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3685 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3686 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003687
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003688- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3689 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003690
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003691- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3692
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003693- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3694 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3695
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003696- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3697 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3698 supported.
3699
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003700- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3701
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003702- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3703 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003704
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003705- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3706 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3707
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003708- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3709
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003710- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3711 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3712
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003713- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3714 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3715 functions but callable type objects.
3716
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003717- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003718 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003719 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003720
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003721- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3722 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003723
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003724- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3725 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003726
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003727- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3728 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3729 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3730 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3731
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003732- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3733 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003734
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003735- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3736 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3737 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3738 and __imul__.
3739
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003740- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003741 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3742 is called.
3743
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003744- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3745 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3746 interpreter was compiled.
3747
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003748- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3749 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3750 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003751 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003752 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3753 1, not 2.
3754
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003755- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3756 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3757 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3758 limit.
3759
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003760- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3761 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3762 bug #623464.
3763
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003764- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3765 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3766 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3767 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3768
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003769Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003770-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003771
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003772- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3773
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003774- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3775 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3776 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3777 with Python 2.3a2.
3778
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003779- os.path exposes getctime.
3780
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003781- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003782 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003783 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003784 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003785 unit tests of floating point results.
3786
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003787- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3788 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3789 has been increased.
3790
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003791- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3792 executed.
3793
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003794- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3795 postinstallation script.
3796
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003797- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3798 test the current module.
3799
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003800- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003801 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3802 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3803 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3804 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3805
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003806- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003807 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003808 Ward's Optik package.
3809
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003810- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3811 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3812 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3813 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3814
3815- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3816 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003817 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003818
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003819- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3820 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3821 shelf are binary pickles.
3822
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003823- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3824 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3825
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003826- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3827 modules are iterators now.
3828
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003829- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3830 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3831 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3832 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3833 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3834 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003835
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003836- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3837 with their entity value.
3838
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003839- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3840
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003841- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3842 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003843
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003844- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3845 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003846 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003847
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003848- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3849 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3850 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3851 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3852 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3853 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3854 main():
3855
3856 import locale
3857 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3858
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003859- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3860 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3861
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003862- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3863 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3864 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3865 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3866 to the new standard.
3867
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003868- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3869 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3870 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3871 an extension to the database.
3872
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003873- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3874 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3875 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3876 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003877 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003878
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003879- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003880 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003881
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003882- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3883 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3884 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3885 bounded integers.
3886
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003887- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3888 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3889 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3890 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3891 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3892 in existence.
3893
3894 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3895 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3896 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3897 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3898 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3899 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3900
3901 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3902 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3903 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3904 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3905
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003906- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3907 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3908 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3909
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003910- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3911
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003912- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3913 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3914 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3915 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3916
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003917- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3918 argument.
3919
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003920- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3921 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3922 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3923 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3924 [SF patch 560794].
3925
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003926- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3927 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3928 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003929 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3930 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3931 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003932
3933- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3934 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003935
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003936- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3937 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3938 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3939 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003940
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003941- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3942 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3943 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3944 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3945 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3946
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003947- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003948
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003949- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3950
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003951- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3952 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3953 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3954 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3955 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3956 identical to None.
3957
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003958- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3959 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3960 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3961 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3962 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3963 results now.
3964
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003965- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3966 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3967
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003968- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3969 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3970 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3971 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3972 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3973 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3974 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3975 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3976
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003977- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3978
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003979- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3980 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3981
3982- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3983 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3984 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3985 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3986 and other systems.
3987
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003988- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3989 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3990 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3991 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 +00003992 work well with these.
3993
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003994- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3995
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003996- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003997 connections.
3998
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003999- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4000 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4001 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4002
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004003- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4004 sets
4005
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004006- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4007 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4008 name.
4009
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004010- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4011 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4012 passed in.
4013
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004014- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004015 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004016 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4017 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004018
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004019- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4020
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004021- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4022
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004023- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4024 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4025 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4026
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004027- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4028 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4029 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4030 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004031 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004032
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004033- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004034 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004035 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004036
4037- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4038 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4039 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4040
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004041- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004042 the value of its expression argument.
4043
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004044- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4045 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4046 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4047
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004048- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4049 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4050 skipstone browser was included.
4051
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004052- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4053 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4054
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004055Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004056-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004057
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004058- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4059 names in addition to accepting file names.
4060
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004061- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4062 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4063 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4064 still used and useful.)
4065
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004066- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4067 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4068 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4069 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004070
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004071- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4072 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4073 the generated binary.
4074
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004075Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004076-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004077
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004078- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4079
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004080- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4081 except in the hands of experts.
4082
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004083- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004084 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4085 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4086 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004087
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004088- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4089 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4090 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4091 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4092 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4093 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4094 builds.
4095
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004096- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4097 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4098 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4099 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4100 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4101 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4102 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4103 new type.
4104
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004105- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004106
4107 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4108 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4109 positive infinities.
4110
4111 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4112 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4113 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4114 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4115 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4116 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4117 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4118
4119 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4120
4121 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4122
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004123- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4124 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4125 size of the executable.
4126
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004127- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4128 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4129 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4130 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004131
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004132- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4133
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004134- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4135 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4136 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004137
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004138- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4139 well as Unix.
4140
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004141- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4142 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4143 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4144 modules in the README file for details.
4145
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004146C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004147-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004148
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004149- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4150 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004151 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004152 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004153 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004154
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004155- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4156 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4157 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4158 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4159 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4160 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004161 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004162 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4163 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4164 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4165 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4166 aligned.)
4167
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004168- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4169 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4170 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4171
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004172- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4173 level.
4174
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004175- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4176 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4177 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4178 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4179 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4180
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004181- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4182 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4183 code.
4184
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004185- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4186 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4187 adjusting for negative indices.
4188
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004189- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4190 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4191 object.
4192
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004193- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4194 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4195 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4196
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004197- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4198 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004199
4200- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4201
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004202- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4203 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4204 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4205 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4206
4207- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4208
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004209- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004210
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004211- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004212 without going through the buffer API.
4213
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004214- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004215
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004216- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4217 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4218 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4219 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4220
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004221- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4222 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4223
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004224- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004225 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4226
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004227New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004228-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004229
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004230- OpenVMS is now supported.
4231
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004232- AtheOS is now supported.
4233
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004234- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4235
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004236- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4237
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004238Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004239-----
4240
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004241- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4242 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4243 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004244
4245Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004246-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004247
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004248- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4249 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4250 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4251 bugs.
4252 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004253 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004254 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4255 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004256 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004257
4258- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004259 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004260
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004261- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4262 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4263
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004264- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4265 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004266 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004267 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4268
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004269- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4270 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4271 use files" uninstall option).
4272
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004273- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4274
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004275- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4276 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4277
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004278- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4279 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4280 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4281
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004282- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4283 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4284 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4285 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4286 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004287 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4288 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4289 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004290
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004291- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004292 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004293 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4294 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4295 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4296 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4297 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4298 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4299 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4300 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4301 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4302 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4303 work around.
4304
4305- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4306 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4307 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4308 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4309 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4310 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4311 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4312 specified with O_CREAT too).
4313
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004314Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004315----
4316
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004317- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004318
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004319- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4320 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4321 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4322
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004323- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4324 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4325 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4326
4327- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4328 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4329 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4330 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4331 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4332 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4333 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4334 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004335
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004336- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4337 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4338 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004339
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004340- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4341 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4342 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4343 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4344 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004345
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004346- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4347 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4348 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004349
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004350- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4351 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004352
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004353- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4354 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4355 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4356 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4357 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004358
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004359- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4360 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4361 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4362
4363- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4364 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4365 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004366
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004367- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4368 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4369 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4370 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004371 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004372
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004373- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4374 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004375
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004376- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4377 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004378
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004379- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004380 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004381 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4382 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004383
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004384
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004385What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004386===============================
4387
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004388*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4389
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004390Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004391--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004392
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004393- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4394 with a custom metaclass.
4395
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004396Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004397-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004398
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004399- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4400 are proxies.
4401
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004402Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004403-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004404
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004405- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4406 very short strings.
4407
4408- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4409 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4410 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4411 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4412 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4413
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004414Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004415-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004416
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004417- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4418 close or delete time).
4419
4420- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4421 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4422
4423- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4424
4425- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004426 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004427
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004428Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004429-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004430
4431Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004432-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004433
4434C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004435-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004436
4437New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004438-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004439
4440Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004441-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004442
4443Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004444-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004445
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004446- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4447
4448- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4449 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4450
4451- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4452 deleted at process exit time.
4453
4454- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4455 in backslash.
4456
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004457Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004458----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004459
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004460- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4461 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4462 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4463
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004464
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004465What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004466===========================
4467
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004468*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4469
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004470Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004471--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004472
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004473- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4474 been extensively updated. See
4475
4476 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4477
4478 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4479
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004480- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4481 deleted!
4482
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004483- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4484 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4485 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4486 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4487 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4488
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004489- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4490
4491 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4492 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4493
4494 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4495 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4496 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4497 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4498 supported anyway.
4499
4500 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4501 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4502
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004503- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4504 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4505 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4506 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4507 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004508
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004509- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4510 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4511 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4512
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004513Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004514-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004515
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004516- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4517 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4518 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4519 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4520 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4521 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004522 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4523 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4524 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4525 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004526
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004527- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4528 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4529 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4530
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004531Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004532-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004533
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004534- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4535
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004536Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004537-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004538
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004539- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4540 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4541 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4542 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4543 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4544 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4545
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004546- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4547
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004548- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4549
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004550- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4551
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004552- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4553 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4554 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4555
4556- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4557
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004558Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004560
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004561- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4562 off a search on Google.
4563
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004564Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004565-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004566
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004567- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4568 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4569 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4570 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4571 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4572 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4573 other platforms should do likewise.
4574
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004575- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4576 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4577 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4578
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004579C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004580-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004581
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004582- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4583 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4584 producing key-value pairs.
4585
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004586- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004587 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004588 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4589 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4590 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4591 previously went unchallenged.
4592
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004593New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004594-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004595
4596Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004597-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004598
4599Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004600-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004601
4602Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004603----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004604
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004605- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4606 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004607
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004608- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4609 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4610 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4611 home.
4612
4613
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004614What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004615===========================
4616
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004617*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4618
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004619Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004620--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004621
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004622- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4623 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004624
4625 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004626 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004627
4628 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4629 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004630 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004631 This needs to be documented.
4632
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004633- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4634 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4635
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004636- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4637 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4638 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4639
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004640- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4641 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4642
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004643- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4644 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4645 class forbids it).
4646
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004647- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4648 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4649 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4650
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004651- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4652
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004653Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004654-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004655
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004656- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4657 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004658 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004659
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004660- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4661 (like 1 + '').
4662
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004663Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004664-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004665
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004666- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4667 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4668 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4669 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004670 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004671 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4672
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004673- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4674 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4675 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4676 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4677
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004678- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4679 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004680 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4681 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4682 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004683
4684- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4685 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004686
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004687- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4688 bytes on its input.
4689
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004690Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004691-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004692
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004693- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004694 convenience function.
4695
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004696- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4697 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4698 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004699 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4700 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4701 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4702 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4703 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4704 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004705
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004706- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4707 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4708 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4709 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4710
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004711- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4712 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4713 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4714
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004715- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4716 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4717 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4718 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4719
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004720- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4721 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004722 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004723 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4724 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4725 new -l and -e options.
4726
4727- statcache is now deprecated.
4728
4729- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4730 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004731 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004732 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4733 time properly taken into account.
4734
4735- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4736 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4737 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4738 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4739
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004740Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004741-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004742
4743Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004744-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004745
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004746- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4747 is built with libdb3 if available.
4748
4749- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4750
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004751C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004752-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004753
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004754- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4755 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4756 PySequence_Size().
4757
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004758- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4759
4760- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4761 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4762 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4763
4764- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4765 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4766
4767- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4768 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4769
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004770New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004771-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004772
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004773- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4774 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4775
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004776- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4777 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4778
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004779- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4780
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004781Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004782-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004783
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004784- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4785 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4786
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004787Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004789
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004790Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004791----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004792
4793- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4794 removed completely in the next release.
4795
4796- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4797 OSX.
4798
4799- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4800 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4801
4802- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4803
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004804
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004805What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004806===========================
4807
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004808*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4809
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004810Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004811--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004812
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004813- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004814 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004815 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004816 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4817 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004818 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4819 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004820 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4821 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004822
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004823- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4824 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4825
4826- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4827 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4828
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004829Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004830-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004831
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004832- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4833 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4834 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4835 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4836 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4837 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4838 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4839 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4840
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004841- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4842 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4843 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4844 example).
4845
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004846- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004847 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004848 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004849 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004850
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004851- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4852 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4853 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004854 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004855
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004856- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4857 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4858 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4859 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4860 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4861 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4862
4863 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4864
4865 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4866
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004867Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004868-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004869
4870- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4871
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004872- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4873
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004874- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4875 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004876
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004877- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4878 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4879 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4880 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4881 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4882 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004883 attributes.
4884
4885- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4886 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4887 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004888
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004889- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4890 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4891 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004892
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004893- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4894 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4895 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004896 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4897 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4898
4899- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4900 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004901
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004902Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004903-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004904
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004905- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4906 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4907
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004908- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4909 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4910 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4911 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4912
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004913- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4914 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4915 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4916 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4917
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004918 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4919 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4920 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4921 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4922 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4923 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4924 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4925 without losing information).
4926
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004927- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004928 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4929 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4930 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4931 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4932 module).
4933
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004934 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004935 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4936 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4937 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4938 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004939
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004940- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004941 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4942 encoding.
4943
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004944- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4945 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4946
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004947- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004948 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4949
4950- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4951 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4952 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4953 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4954
4955- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4956
4957- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4958 ON, and OFF.
4959
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004960- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4961 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4962
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004963Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004964-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004965
4966- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4967 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4968 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004969
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004970- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4971 been added: -X and -E.
4972
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004973Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004974-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004975
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004976- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4977 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4978
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004979C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004980-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004981
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004982- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4983 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4984 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4985 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4986 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4987
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004988- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4989 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4990 as long) arguments.
4991
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004992- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4993 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4994 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4995 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4996 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4997 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4998
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004999- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5000 input.
5001
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005002New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005003-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005004
5005Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005006-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005007
5008Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005009-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005010
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005011- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5012 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5013 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5014
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005015- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5016 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5017 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005018 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005019
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005020 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5021 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5022 import signal
5023 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005024
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005025 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005026 while 1:
5027 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005028 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005029 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5030 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5031 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5032 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005033
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005034
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005035What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5036===========================
5037
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005038*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5039
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005040Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005041--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005042
5043- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5044 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5045 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5046
5047- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5048 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5049 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5050 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5051 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5052 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5053 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005054
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005055- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005056 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005057 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5058 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5059 associate a docstring with a property.
5060
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005061- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5062 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5063 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5064 other built-in object types.
5065
5066- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5067 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5068 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5069 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5070 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5071
5072- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5073 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5074
5075- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5076 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005077 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005078 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5079 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5080 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5081 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5082 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5083
5084- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5085 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5086 class.
5087
5088- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5089 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5090 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5091 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5092
5093- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5094 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5095 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5096 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5097
5098- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5099 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5100
5101- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5102 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5103 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5104 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5105 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005106 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005107 with the same value as s.
5108
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005109- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5110
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005111Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005112----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005113
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005114- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5115
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005116- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5117 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5118 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5119 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5120 objects.
5121
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005122- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5123 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005124 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5125 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5126
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005127- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5128 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5129 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5130
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005131Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005132-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005133
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005134- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5135 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5136 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5137 by the instances.
5138
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005139- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5140 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5141 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5142
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005143- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5144 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5145 before the entire comparison is complete.
5146
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005147- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5148 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5149 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5150
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005151- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5152 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5153 getwriter().
5154
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005155- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5156 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5157
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005158- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005159 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5160 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5161
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005162- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5163 iterable object.
5164
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005165- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5166 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005167
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005168- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5169 authentication.
5170
5171- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5172 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005173
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005174- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005175 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5176 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5177 a sample driver.)
5178
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005179Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005180-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005181
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005182- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5183 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5184 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5185 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5186 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5187 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5188 kernel has large file support.
5189
5190- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5191 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5192 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5193 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5194 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5195
5196- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5197 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5198 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5199
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005200C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005201-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005202
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005203- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5204 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5205
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005206New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005207-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005208
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005209- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5210 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5211
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005212Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005213-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005214
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005215- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5216 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5217 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5218 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5219 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5220
5221- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5222 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5223 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5224 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5225
5226- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5227 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5228
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005229Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005230-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005231
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005232- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005233 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5234 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005235
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005236
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005237What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5238===========================
5239
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005240*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5241
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005242Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005243----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005244
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005245- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5246 big to represent as a C double.
5247
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005248- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5249 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5250 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5251 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5252 restriction).
5253
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005254- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5255 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5256 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5257 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5258 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5259
5260 >>> dir([])
5261 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5262 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5263 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5264 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5265 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5266 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5267 'reverse', 'sort']
5268
5269 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5270
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005271- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005272 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5273 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5274 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5275 OverflowError exception.
5276
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005277- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005278 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005279 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5280 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5281 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5282 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5283 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005284 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005285 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5286 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5287
5288 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5289 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5290 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5291 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005292
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005293- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005294 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5295 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5296 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5297 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5298 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5299 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5300 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5301 once it is created.
5302
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005303- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5304 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5305 (key, value) pairs.
5306
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005307- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005308 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5309 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5310
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005311- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5312 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5313 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5314 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5315 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005316
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005317- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005318 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5319 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5320
5321 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5322
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005323- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005324 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5325
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005326Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005327-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005328
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005329- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005330 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5331 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005332
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005333- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5334 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5335 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5336 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5337 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5338 in this area anymore).
5339
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005340- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5341 threading.Timer.
5342
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005343- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5344 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5345
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005346- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005347 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5348
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005349- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005350 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5351 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5352 converted to Python longs.
5353
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005354- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005355 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5356
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005357- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5358 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5359 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5360
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005361Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005362-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005363
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005364- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5365 division operators as per PEP 238.
5366
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005367Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005368-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005369
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005370- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5371 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5372 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5373 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5374
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005375C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005376-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005377
5378- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005379
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005380- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5381 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005382 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005383
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005384 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5385 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005386 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005387 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005388
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005389- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005390 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5391 module:
5392
5393 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005394
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005395 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5396 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005397
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005398 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5399 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005400
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005401 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5402
5403 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5404
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005405- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005406 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5407 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5408 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005409
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005410New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005411-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005412
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005413- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5414 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5415 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5416 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5417 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005418
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005419Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005420-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005421
5422Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005423-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005424
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005425- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5426 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5427 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5428 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005429 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5430 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5431 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5432 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5433 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005434
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005435- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005436 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5437
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005438
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005439What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5440===========================
5441
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005442*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5443
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005444Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005445-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005446
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005447- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5448 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5449
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005450- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5451 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5452 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005453
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005454- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5455 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5456 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5457 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005458
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005459- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5460
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005461- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005462
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005463Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005464-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005465
5466- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005467 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005468 the module docstring for details.
5469
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005470Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005471-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005472
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005473- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005474 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5475 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5476 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005477
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005478- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5479 Nick Mathewson.
5480
5481Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005482----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005483
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005484- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5485 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5486 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5487 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5488 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5489 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5490 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5491 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5492
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005493- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5494 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5495 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5496 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5497
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005498- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5499 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5500 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5501 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5502 come a long way).
5503
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005504- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5505 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5506 write filters for these warnings).
5507
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005508- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5509 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5510 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5511 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5512 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5513
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005514- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5515 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5516 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5517 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5518 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5519 older distribution.
5520
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005521Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005522-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005523
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005524- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5525 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005526 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005527
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005528- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5529 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5530 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5531
5532- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5533
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005534- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5535
5536- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5537
5538- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5539
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005540- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005541
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005542- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5543
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005544New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005545-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005546
5547C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005548-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005549
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005550- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5551 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5552 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5553 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5554 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5555 against buffer overruns.
5556
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005557- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005558 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5559 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005560 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5561 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5562 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5563
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005564- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5565 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5566 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5567 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5568 deprecated.
5569
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005570Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005571-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005572
5573- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5574 relevant is found.
5575
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005576
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005577What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005578===========================
5579
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005580*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5581
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005582Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005583----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005584
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005585- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5586 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5587 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5588 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5589 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5590 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5591 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5592 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005593 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005594 repaired.
5595
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005596- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005597 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005598 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5599 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5600 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5601 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5602 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5603 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5604 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5605 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5606
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005607- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5608 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5609 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5610 leading BMO character).
5611
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005612- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5613 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5614 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5615
5616 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5617 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5618 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005619
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005620 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5621 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5622 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5623 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5624 for various simple to use conversions.
5625
5626 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5627 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5628
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005629 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5630 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5631 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5632 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5633 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5634 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5635 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5636 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5637 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5638 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5639 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5640 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5641 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5642 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5643 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005644
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005645- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5646 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5647 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005648 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005649 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005650
5651 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005652 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5653 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5654 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5655 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5656 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005657 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5658 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005659
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005660 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5661 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5662 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005663 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005664
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005665- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5666 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5667 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5668 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5669 floating arithmetic,
5670
5671 x = 9007199254740992.0
5672 print long(x)
5673
5674 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5675 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5676 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5677 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5678 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5679 functions are of good quality).
5680
5681 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5682 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5683 algorithms to break.
5684
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005685- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5686 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5687 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5688 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5689 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5690 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5691 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5692 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5693 order.
5694
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005695- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5696 operation along the most common code paths.
5697
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005698- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5699 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5700
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005701- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5702 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5703 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5704 {}.update(UserDict())
5705
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005706- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5707 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5708 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5709 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5710 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5711 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5712 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5713 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5714
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005715- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005716 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005717
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005718 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005719 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5720 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005721 join() method of strings
5722 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005723 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5724 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005725 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005726 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005727
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005728- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5729 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5730
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005731- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5732 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5733
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005734- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5735 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5736 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5737 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5738
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005739- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5740 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005741 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005742 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5743 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005744
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005745- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5746
5747
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005748Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005749-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005750
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005751- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005752 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005753 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5754 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5755
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005756- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5757 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5758
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005759- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5760 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5761 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5762 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5763
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005764- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5765 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5766 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5767
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005768- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5769
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005770- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5771
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005772- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5773 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5774 that are still imported into string.py).
5775
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005776- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5777
5778- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5779 Now it does.
5780
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005781- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5782
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005783- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5784 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5785 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5786 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5787 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005788 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5789 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005790
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005791- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5792 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5793 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5794 'help(object)'.
5795
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005796Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005797-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005798
5799- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005800 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005801 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5802 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5803
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005804- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005805 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5806 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005807
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005808C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005809-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005810
5811- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5812 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005813
5814----
5815
5816**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**