blob: cad22cd561dbfb7ae903e8ef5c03310847de61a9 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000013- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
14 list.sort().
15
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000016- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
17 (2+3) --> (5).
18
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000019- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
20
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000021
22Extension Modules
23-----------------
24
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000025- stat_float_times is now True.
26
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000027- array.array objects are now picklable.
28
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000029- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
30 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
31
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000032- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
33 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
34 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
35
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000036- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
37 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000038
39Library
40-------
41
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +000042- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
43
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +000044- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
45
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000046- Enhancements to the csv module:
47
48 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
49 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
50 PEP 305.
51 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
52 reporting.
53 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
54 dictates.
55 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000056 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000057 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000058 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
59 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000060 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
61 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +000062 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000063 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
64 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
65 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
66 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
67 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
68 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
69 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
70 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
71 without first creating a dialect class.
72 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
73 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
74 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +000075 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000076 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
77 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +000078 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
79 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
80 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
81 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000082 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
83 This has been fixed.
84
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +000085- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
86 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
87 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
88 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
89
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +000090- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
91
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +000092- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
93 (Bug #951915).
94
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +000095- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
96 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
97 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
98 encoding alias table
99
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000100- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
101
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000102- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
103 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
104
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000105- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
106
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000107- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
108
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000109- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
110
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000111- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
112
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000113- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
114
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000115- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
116 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
117 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
118
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000119- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000120 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000121
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000122- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
123 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
124 tokenizer with very long source lines.
125
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000126- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
127 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
128
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000129- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
130 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000131
132Build
133-----
134
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000135- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
136 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
137 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
138 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
139 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
140 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
141 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
142 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
143
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000144
145C API
146-----
147
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000148- Removed PyRange_New().
149
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000150
151Tests
152-----
153
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000154- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000155
156Mac
157---
158
159
160
161Tools/Demos
162-----------
163
164
165
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000166What's New in Python 2.4 final?
167===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000168
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000169*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000170
171Core and builtins
172-----------------
173
174- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
175 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
176 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
177
178
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000179What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
180==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000181
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000182*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000183
184Core and builtins
185-----------------
186
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000187- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
188 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
189 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
190
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000191
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000192Library
193-------
194
195- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
196 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
197 raised is re-raised.
198
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000199- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
200 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
201
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000202- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
203 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
204 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
205 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
206 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
207 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
208 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
209 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
210 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
211 by the slice are recomputed now.
212
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000213- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000214
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000215Build
216-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000217
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000218- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
219 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
220 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000221
222C API
223-----
224
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000225- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
226
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000227
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000228What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
229================================
230
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000231*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000232
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000233License
234-------
235
236The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
237is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
238changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
239Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
240intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
241durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
242the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
243License::
244
245 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
246
247says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
248to Python 2.1.1.
249
250The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
251License Version 2.
252
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000253Core and builtins
254-----------------
255
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000256- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
257 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
258 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
259 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
260 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
261 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
262 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
263 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
264 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
265 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
266
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000267- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000268
269Extension Modules
270-----------------
271
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000272- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
273 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
274 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
275 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000276
277Library
278-------
279
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000280- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
281 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
282 returned.
283
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000284- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
285
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000286- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
287 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
288
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000289- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
290
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000291- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
292 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000293
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000294- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
295
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000296- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
297
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000298- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000299 the source code is updated and reloaded.
300
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000301Build
302-----
303
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000304- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000305
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000306What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
307================================
308
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000309*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000310
311Core and builtins
312-----------------
313
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000314- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000315 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
316
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000317- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
318 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
319 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
320 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
321
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000322- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
323 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
324
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000325- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
326 constant.
327
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000328- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
329 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
330 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
331 large), and to anomalies such as
332 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
333 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
334 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
335 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000336
337Extension modules
338-----------------
339
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000340- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
341 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000342 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
343 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
344 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000345
346Library
347-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000348
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000349- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000350 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000351 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
352 --swig-cpp.
353
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000354- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
355 it is set.
356
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000357- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000358
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000359- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
360 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
361 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
362 Closes bug #1039270.
363
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000364- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000365
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000366 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000367 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
368 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
369 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
370 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
371 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
372 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
373 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
374 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
375 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
376 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
377 + Updates to documentation.
378
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000379- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
380 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
381 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
382 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
383
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000384- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000385
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000386- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
387 applications should use the getmember function.
388
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000389- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
390
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000391- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
392 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
393 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
394 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
395 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
396 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
397 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
398 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
399 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
400
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000401- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
402 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000403 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000404
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000405- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
406 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
407 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
408 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
409 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
410 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
411 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
412 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000413
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000414- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
415 the new public features (of which there are many).
416
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000417- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000418 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
419 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
420 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
421 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000422 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000423
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000424- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
425
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000426- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
427 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
428 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
429 options.
430
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000431- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
432 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
433 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
434 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
435 conditions under which non-string values work.
436
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000437Build
438-----
439
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000440- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
441 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
442 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
443
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000444- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
445 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
446 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
447 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
448 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000449
450C API
451-----
452
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000453- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
454 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
455
456- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
457
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000458- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
459 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
460 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
461 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
462 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
463 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
464 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
465 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
466 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
467
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000468- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
469
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000470- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
471 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
472 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000473
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000474Tests
475-----
476
477- test__locale ported to unittest
478
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000479Mac
480---
481
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000482- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
483 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
484 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000485
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000486Tools/Demos
487-----------
488
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000489- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
490 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
491 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
492 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
493 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000494
495
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000496What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
497=================================
498
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000499*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000500
501Core and builtins
502-----------------
503
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000504- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000505 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
506
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000507- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
508 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
509 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
510 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
511 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
512 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
513 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
514 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000515 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
516 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
517 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
518 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
519 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000520
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000521- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
522 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
523 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
524 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
525 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
526
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000527- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
528
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000529- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
530 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
531
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000532- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
533 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
534 modified the list.
535
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000536- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
537 functions is now writable.
538
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000539- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
540 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
541 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
542 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
543
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000544- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
545 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
546 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
547 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
548 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000549
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000550- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
551 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
552
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000553Extension modules
554-----------------
555
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000556- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
557
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000558- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
559 data.
560
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000561- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
562 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
563 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
564 supposed to have been truncated away.
565
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000566- Added socket.socketpair().
567
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000568- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
569 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
570
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000571- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000572 versions of Python, have now been removed.
573
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000574Library
575-------
576
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000577- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000578 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000579
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000580- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
581 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
582
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000583- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
584 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
585
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000586- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
587
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000588- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
589 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000590
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000591- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
592 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
593
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000594- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
595
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000596- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
597
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000598- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
599
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000600- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
601 Percivall.
602
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000603- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
604 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
605
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000606- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
607 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
608 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000609 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000610
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000611- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
612 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
613 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
614 and exponent.
615
616- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
617
618- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
619 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
620 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
621
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000622- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
623 to the readline module.
624
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000625- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000626 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
627 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000628
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000629- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
630 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
631 contains symlinks.
632
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000633- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
634 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
635
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000636- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
637 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
638 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
639
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000640- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
641 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
642 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
643 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
644 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
645 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
646 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
647 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
648 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
649 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
650 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
651 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
652 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
653
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000654- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
655
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000656Tools/Demos
657-----------
658
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000659- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
660 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
661
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000662- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
663
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000664Build
665-----
666
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000667- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
668 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
669 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
670 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
671 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
672 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
673 plans to do so.
674
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000675- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
676 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
677
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000678- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
679 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
680
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000681- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
682 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
683
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000684- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
685 GNU/k*BSD systems.
686
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000687- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
688 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
689
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000690C API
691-----
692
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000693..
694
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000695Documentation
696-------------
697
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000698- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
699 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
700
701- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
702 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
703 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000704
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000705New platforms
706-------------
707
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000708- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
709
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000710Tests
711-----
712
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000713..
714
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000715Windows
716-------
717
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000718- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
719 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
720 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
721 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
722 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
723 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
724 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
725 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
726 the problem.
727
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000728Mac
729---
730
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000731..
732
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000733
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000734What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
735=================================
736
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000737*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000738
739Core and builtins
740-----------------
741
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000742- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
743 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
744 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
745 sensitive code.
746
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000747- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000748 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000749
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000750 @staticmethod
751 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000752
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000753 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000754
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000755- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
756 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
757 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
758 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
759 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
760 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
761 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
762 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
763 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
764 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
765 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
766
767 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
768 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
769 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
770 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
771 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
772 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
773 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
774
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000775- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
776 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
777
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000778- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000779 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000780
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000781- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000782 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000783 which was missing for no apparent reason.
784
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000785- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000786 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
787 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
788
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000789- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
790 types that support garbage collection.
791
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000792- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
793
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000794- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
795 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
796 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
797 Jython.
798
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000799- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
800
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000801- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
802 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
803
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000804- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
805 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
806 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000807
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000808- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
809 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
810 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
811
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000812Extension modules
813-----------------
814
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000815- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
816
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000817Library
818-------
819
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000820- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
821 TIS-620
822
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000823- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
824 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
825 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
826 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
827 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
828 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
829 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
830 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
831 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
832 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
833
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000834- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
835
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000836- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
837 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
838 same as when the argument is omitted).
839 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
840
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000841- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
842
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000843- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
844 schemes are offered.
845
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000846- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
847
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000848- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
849 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
850 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
851
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000852- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
853
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000854- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
855 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
856
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000857- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
858 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
859 when dummy_threading is being used.
860
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000861- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
862 from a tarfile.
863
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000864- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000865 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000866
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000867- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
868 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
869 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
870 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
871
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000872- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
873 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
874
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000875- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
876 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
877 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
878 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
879 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
880 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
881 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
882 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
883 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
884 by some other method in progress).
885
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000886- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
887 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
888 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000889
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000890- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
891
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000892- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
893 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
894 AM Kuchling.
895
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000896- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
897 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
898 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
899
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000900- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
901 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
902 instead of unsigned.
903
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000904- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000905 no longer part of the public API.
906
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000907- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
908 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
909 string methods of the same name).
910
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000911- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000912 SF patch 945642.
913
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000914- doctest unittest integration improvements:
915
916 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
917
918 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
919 DocTestSuites.
920
921- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
922 that provide thread-local data.
923
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000924- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
925 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
926
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000927- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
928
929- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
930 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
931 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
932
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000933- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
934
935 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
936 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
937 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000938
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000939 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
940 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
941 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
942 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
943
944 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
945 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
946
947 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
948 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
949 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
950 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
951
952 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
953 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
954 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
955 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
956 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
957
958 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
959 wrapping help output.
960
961 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
962 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
963 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000964
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000965C API
966-----
967
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000968- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
969 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
970 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
971 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
972 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
973 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
974 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
975 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
976 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
977 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
978 its visible semantics have not changed.
979
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000980- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
981 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
982
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000983Documentation
984-------------
985
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000986- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000987
988 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000989 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000990
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000991 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000992
993 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
994
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000995- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000996
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000997Tests
998-----
999
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001000- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001001 platforms that use the Makefile.
1002
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001003- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1004 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1005 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1006
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001007
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001008What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1009=================================
1010
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001011*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001012
1013Core and builtins
1014-----------------
1015
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001016- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1017 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1018 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1019 objects now (one object instead of three).
1020
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001021- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1022 Windows DLLs.
1023
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001024- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1025 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001026
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001027- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1028 a new .pyc magic.
1029
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001030- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1031 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1032 be there.
1033
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001034- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1035 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1036 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1037
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001038- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1039 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1040 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1041
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001042- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1043
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001044- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1045 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1046 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001047
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001048- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1049 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1050
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001051- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1052
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001053- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001054 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001055
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001056- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1057
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001058- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1059
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001060- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1061 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1062
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001063- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1064 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1065 Fixes bug #858016 .
1066
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001067- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1068 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1069 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1070
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001071- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1072 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1073 improves their performance (about 35%).
1074
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001075- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1076 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1077 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1078
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001079- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1080 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1081 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1082 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1083
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001084- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1085 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1086 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1087 length is not known).
1088
1089- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1090 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001091 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1092 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001093 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1094
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001095- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1096 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1097
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001098- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1099 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1100 keyword arguments.
1101
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001102- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1103 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1104 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1105
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001106- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1107 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1108 cases.
1109
1110- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1111 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1112 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1113 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1114 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1115 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1116 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1117 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1118 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1119 a release build.
1120
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001121- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1122 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1123
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001124- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001125 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001126
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001127- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1128 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1129 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1130 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1131 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1132 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1133 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1134 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1135 destroyed.
1136
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001137- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1138 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1139 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1140 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1141 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1142 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1143 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1144 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1145
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001146- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1147 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1148 character other than a space.
1149
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001150- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1151 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1152 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1153 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1154 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1155 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1156 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1157 attributes with the same name.
1158
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001159- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1160 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1161 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1162 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1163 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1164 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1165 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1166 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1167 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1168 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1169 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1170 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1171 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1172 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001173
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001174- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1175 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1176 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1177 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1178 This has been repaired.
1179
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001180- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1181
1182- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1183
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001184- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1185 over a sequence.
1186
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001187- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001188 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001189
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001190- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1191
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001192- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1193 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1194 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1195 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1196 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1197 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1198 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1199 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1200
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001201- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1202 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1203 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1204
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001205- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1206 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1207 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1208 freelist.
1209
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001210- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1211 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1212
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001213- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1214 number.
1215
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001216- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1217 a TypeError exception.
1218
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001219- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1220 820195.
1221
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001222- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1223 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1224 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1225
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001226- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001227 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1228 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001229
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001230- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1231 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1232 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1233
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001234- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1235 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001236 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001237
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001238- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001239 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1240 the first call.
1241
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001242
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001243Extension modules
1244-----------------
1245
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001246- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1247 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1248
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001249- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1250 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1251 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1252 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1253 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1254 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1255 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001256
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001257- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1258
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001259- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1260
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001261- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1262 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1263
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001264- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1265 fewer false positives.
1266
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001267- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1268 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1269
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001270- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001271 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1272
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001273- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001274 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001275 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001276 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1277 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001278
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001279- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1280 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1281 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1282 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1283
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001284- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1285 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1286 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1287 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1288 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1289 #897625.
1290
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001291- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1292 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1293
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001294- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1295 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1296 and pops on either side of the deque.
1297
1298- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1299 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1300
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001301- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1302 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1303 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1304 other functions that expect a function argument.
1305
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001306- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1307
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001308- os.getsid was added.
1309
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001310- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1311 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1312 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1313
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001314- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1315
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001316- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1317
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001318- readline.clear_history was added.
1319
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001320- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1321
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001322- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1323
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001324- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1325
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001326- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1327
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001328- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1329
1330- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1331
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001332- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1333
1334- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1335
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001336- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1337 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1338 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1339
1340- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1341 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1342 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1343 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1344 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1345 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1346 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1347
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001348- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1349 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1350 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1351 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001352
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001353- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001354 iterators from a single iterable.
1355
1356- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1357 of raising a TypeError exception.
1358
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001359- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1360 as parameter.
1361
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001362Library
1363-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001364
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001365- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1366 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1367 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001368
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001369- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1370 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1371 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001372
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001373- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001374
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001375- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1376 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001377
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001378- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1379 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1380
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001381- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1382
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001383- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001384 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001385
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001386- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001387 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001388
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001389- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1390
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001391- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1392 on cygwin and mingw32.
1393
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001394- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1395
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001396- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1397 module.
1398
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001399- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1400 installation scheme for all platforms.
1401
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001402- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001403 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001404
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001405- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1406 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1407 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1408
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001409- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1410 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1411 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1412
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001413- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1414
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001415- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1416
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001417- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1418 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1419
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001420- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1421 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1422 type pattern with the same value exists.
1423
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001424- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1425 when run from the command prompt).
1426
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001427- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1428 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1429
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001430- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1431 default sort).
1432
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001433- Added global runctx function to profile module
1434
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001435- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1436
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001437- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1438
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001439- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1440
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001441- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001442 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1443 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1444 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1445 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1446 accordingly.
1447
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001448- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1449 decoding standards.
1450
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001451- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1452 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1453 called for all requests.
1454
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001455- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1456 they are passed to the compiler.
1457
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001458- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1459 indent, width and depth.
1460
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001461- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1462 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1463
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001464- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1465 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1466
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001467- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1468
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001469- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1470
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001471- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1472
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001473- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1474 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1475
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001476- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001477 for better performance.
1478
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001479- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001480
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001481- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1482 a string).
1483
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001484- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1485
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001486- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1487
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001488- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1489
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001490- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1491
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001492- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1493 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1494 list of fieldnames.
1495
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001496- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1497 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1498
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001499- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1500
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001501- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1502 empty lists.
1503
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001504- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1505 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1506 and shelves.
1507
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001508- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1509 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1510
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001511- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001512 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1513 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001514
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001515- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1516 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001517 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001518
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001519- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001520 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1521 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1522
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001523- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1524 and removed in Py2.4.
1525
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001526- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1527
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001528- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1529
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001530Tools/Demos
1531-----------
1532
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001533- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1534 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1535
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001536- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1537
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001538- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1539 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1540 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1541 destination in situations where both files are given.
1542
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001543- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1544 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1545 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1546 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1547
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001548- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1549
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001550- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1551 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1552 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1553 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1554 now.
1555
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001556- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1557 in effect
1558
1559- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1560 C-c C-h
1561
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001562- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1563 -d option was given.
1564
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001565Build
1566-----
1567
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001568- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1569 build under OS X.
1570
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001571- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1572 --enable-profiling.
1573
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001574- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1575 is configured --with-tsc.
1576
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001577- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1578 on AMD64.
1579
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001580- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1581 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1582
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001583- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1584 removed.
1585
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001586- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1587 supported (see PEP 11).
1588
1589- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1590
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001591- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1592
1593- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1594 (see PEP 11).
1595
1596- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1597 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1598
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001599C API
1600-----
1601
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001602- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1603 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1604 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1605
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001606- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1607 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1608 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1609 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1610
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001611- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1612 generator objects.
1613
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001614- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1615 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001616 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1617 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001618
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001619- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1620 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1621
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001622- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1623 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1624 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1625 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1626 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1627
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001628- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1629 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1630 about 10% faster.
1631
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001632- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1633 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1634
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001635- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1636 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1637 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1638 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1639
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001640Windows
1641-------
1642
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001643- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1644 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1645 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1646 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1647
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001648- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1649 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1650 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1651
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001652
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001653What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1654===============================
1655
1656*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1657
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001658IDLE
1659----
1660
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001661- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1662 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1663 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1664 context-menu actions.
1665
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001666- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1667 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1668 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1669 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1670 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1671 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1672 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1673 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1674 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1675
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001676
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001677What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1678=============================================
1679
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001680*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001681
1682Core and builtins
1683-----------------
1684
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001685- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001686 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001687 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1688
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001689Extension modules
1690-----------------
1691
1692- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1693 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1694 than once. This has been fixed.
1695
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001696- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1697 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1698 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1699 call.
1700
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001701- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1702
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001703Library
1704-------
1705
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001706- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1707 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1708
1709- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1710 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1711 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1712 restored.
1713
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001714IDLE
1715----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001716
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001717- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001718
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001719Build
1720-----
1721
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001722- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1723 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1724
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001725C API
1726-----
1727
1728Windows
1729-------
1730
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001731- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1732 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1733
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001734- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1735
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001736Mac
1737---
1738
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001739- Various fixes to pimp.
1740
1741- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1742
1743- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1744 more problems than it solves.
1745
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001746
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001747What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1748=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001749
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001750*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1751
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001752Core and builtins
1753-----------------
1754
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001755- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1756 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1757
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001758- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1759 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001760 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001761
1762- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1763 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1764 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001765 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001766
1767- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1768 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001769
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001770- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1771 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1772 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1773
1774- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001775 770247.
1776
1777- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001778
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001779Extension modules
1780-----------------
1781
1782- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1783 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1784
1785- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1786
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001787- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1788
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001789- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1790 contained within the _strptime module.
1791
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001792- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1793 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1794
1795- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001796 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1797
1798- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1799 the find_class attribute, if present.
1800
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001801- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001802
1803 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1804 (SF bug 763298).
1805
1806 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001807 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1808 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1809 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001810
1811 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1812
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001813Library
1814-------
1815
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001816- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1817
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001818- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1819 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1820 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1821 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1822 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1823 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1824 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1825 or Tester().
1826
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001827- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1828 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1829 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1830 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1831 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1832 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1833 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1834 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1835 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001836
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001837 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001838
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001839- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1840 weren't before was an oversight.
1841
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001842- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1843 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1844
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001845- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1846 when there are no lines.
1847
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001848- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1849 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1850
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001851- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1852 to child processes.
1853
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001854- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1855
1856- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1857
1858- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1859 xmlrpclib.
1860
1861- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1862 responses.
1863
1864- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1865 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1866
1867- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1868 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1869 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1870
1871- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1872 used as patterns.
1873
1874- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1875 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1876 than Tk 8.3.
1877
1878- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1879
1880- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001881
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001882Tools/Demos
1883-----------
1884
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001885- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1886
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001887- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1888
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001889- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001890
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001891Build
1892-----
1893
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001894- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1895
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001896- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1897
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001898- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1899 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001900
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001901- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1902 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1903 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001904
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001905C API
1906-----
1907
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001908- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1909 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1910
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001911Windows
1912-------
1913
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001914- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1915 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1916 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1917 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1918 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1919 Python exception ::
1920
1921 thread.error: can't start new thread
1922
1923 is raised now.
1924
1925- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1926 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1927 instead of from DLL teardown.
1928
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001929Mac
1930---
1931
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001932- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001933 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001934 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1935 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1936 the executable in the bundle.
1937
1938- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001939
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001940- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1941
1942- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1943 on Panther.
1944
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001945What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1946================================
1947
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001948*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001949
1950Core and builtins
1951-----------------
1952
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001953- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1954 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1955 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1956 with the -i option.
1957
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001958- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1959 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1960
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001961- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1962 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1963
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001964- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1965 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1966 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1967 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1968 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1969 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1970 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1971 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1972 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1973 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1974 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1975 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1976 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001977
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001978- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1979 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1980 embedded in a lambda expression.
1981
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001982- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1983 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1984 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1985 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1986 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1987
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001988- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1989 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1990 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1991
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001992- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1993 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1994
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001995- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1996 It's writable again.
1997
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001998- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1999 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2000 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002001 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002002
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002003- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2004 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2005 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2006
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002007Extension modules
2008-----------------
2009
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002010- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2011 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2012
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002013- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2014 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2015 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2016 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2017
2018- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2019 collection.
2020
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002021- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2022 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2023 unique within a single program run.
2024
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002025- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2026 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2027
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002028- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2029 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2030
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002031- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2032 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002033
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002034- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2035
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002036- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2037 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2038
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002039- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2040 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2041 for many BSD-derived systems.
2042
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002043
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002044Library
2045-------
2046
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002047- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2048 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2049 primary ones:
2050
2051 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2052 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2053 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2054
2055 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2056 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2057 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2058 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2059 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2060 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2061
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002062- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2063 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2064 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2065 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2066 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2067 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2068 argument.
2069
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002070- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2071 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2072 in the archive.
2073
2074- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2075 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2076
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002077- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2078 569574).
2079
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002080- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2081 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2082 no more.
2083
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002084- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2085 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2086 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2087 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2088 code coverage.
2089
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002090- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2091 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2092 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002093 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2094 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002095
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002096- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2097 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2098 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002099 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002100
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002101- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2102
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002103- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2104 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2105 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2106 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2107
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002108- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2109 handling.
2110
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002111- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2112 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2113
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002114- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2115 in socket.py.
2116
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002117- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2118
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002119- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2120 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2121 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2122 opener with proxy support.
2123
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002124- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2125
2126- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2127
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002128Tools/Demos
2129-----------
2130
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002131- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2132
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002133- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2134
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002135- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2136 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002137
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002138- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2139 files.
2140
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002141Build
2142-----
2143
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002144- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002145 different root directory.
2146
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002147C API
2148-----
2149
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002150- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2151 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2152 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2153 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2154 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2155 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2156 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2157 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2158 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2159 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2160
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002161- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2162 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2163 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2164 from Python.
2165
2166
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002167New platforms
2168-------------
2169
2170None this time.
2171
2172Tests
2173-----
2174
2175- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2176 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2177
2178Windows
2179-------
2180
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002181- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2182
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002183- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2184 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2185 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2186 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2187 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2188 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2189 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2190 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2191 that's what it's for.
2192
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002193Mac
2194---
2195
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002196- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2197 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2198 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2199 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002200- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2201 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2202- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002203
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002204SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2205------------------------------------
2206
2207430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2208598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2209622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2210661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2211683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2212697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2213713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2214724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2215727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2216729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2217730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2218731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2219732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2220733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2221735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2222740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2223744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2224745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2225747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2226749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2227751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2228753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2229755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2230757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2231760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2232
2233
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002234What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2235================================
2236
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002237*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002238
2239Core and builtins
2240-----------------
2241
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002242- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2243 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2244
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002245- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2246 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2247 and cannot be strings).
2248
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002249- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2250 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2251 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2252 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2253
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002254- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2255 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2256 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2257 Python itself.
2258
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002259- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2260 the referenced object, if it has one.
2261
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002262- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2263 the thread started at
2264 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2265
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002266- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2267 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2268 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2269 placed on a list index.
2270
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002271- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2272 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2273 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2274 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2275
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002276- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2277 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2278 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2279 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2280 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2281 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2282 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2283
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002284- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2285 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2286 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2287 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2288 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2289
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002290- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2291 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002292
2293- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2294 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2295 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2296 #693195.)
2297
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002298- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2299 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002300
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002301- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002302 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002303 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2304 interpreter executions, would fail.
2305
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002306- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002307 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002308 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002309
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002310Extension modules
2311-----------------
2312
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002313- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2314 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2315 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2316 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2317
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002318- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2319 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2320
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002321- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2322 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2323 and Greg Chapman.)
2324
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002325- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2326 recursively.
2327
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002328- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002329 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2330 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2331 leaks.
2332
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002333- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2334
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002335- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2336 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2337 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2338 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2339 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2340 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2341 #705836.
2342
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002343- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002344 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2345
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002346- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2347 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2348 See SF bug #692416.
2349
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002350- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2351 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2352
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002353- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2354 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2355 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002356
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002357- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002358 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2359 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2360
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002361- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2362 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2363 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2364 timeouts to work properly.
2365
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002366Library
2367-------
2368
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002369- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2370 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2371 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2372 future release.
2373
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002374- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2375 for querying platform dependent features.
2376
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002377- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002378
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002379- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2380 pickle protocol versions.
2381
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002382- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2383 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2384 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2385
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002386- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2387
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002388- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2389 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2390 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2391 modules.
2392
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002393- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2394 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2395 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2396
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002397- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2398 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2399
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002400- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2401 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2402 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2403
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002404- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002405 MS Office extensions.
2406
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002407- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2408 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2409
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002410- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2411 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2412
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002413- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2414 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2415 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2416 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2417 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2418 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2419
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002420- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2421 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2422 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002423
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002424- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2425 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2426 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2427
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002428- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2429
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002430- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2431 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2432 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2433
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002434Tools/Demos
2435-----------
2436
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002437- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2438 See the module docstring for details.
2439
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002440Build
2441-----
2442
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002443- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2444 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002445
2446C API
2447-----
2448
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002449- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2450
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002451- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2452 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2453 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2454
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002455- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2456 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002457
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002458 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2459 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2460 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002461
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002462- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002463 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2464
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002465- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2466 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2467 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002468
2469New platforms
2470-------------
2471
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002472None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002473
2474Tests
2475-----
2476
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002477- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2478 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002479
2480Windows
2481-------
2482
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002483- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2484 function.
2485
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002486- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2487 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002488
2489Mac
2490---
2491
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002492- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2493 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002494
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002495- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2496 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002497
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002498- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2499 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2500 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002501
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002502- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002503 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2504 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002505
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002506- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2507 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002508
2509
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002510What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2511=================================
2512
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002513*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002514
2515Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002516-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002517
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002518- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2519 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2520 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2521
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002522- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2523 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2524 (SF patch #664376.)
2525
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002526- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2527 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2528 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2529 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2530 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2531 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002532 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002533
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002534- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2535 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2536 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2537 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002538 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002539
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002540- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2541 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2542 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2543 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2544 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2545 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2546 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2547 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2548 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2549 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2550 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2551
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002552- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2553 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2554 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2555 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2556 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2557 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2558
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002559- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2560 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2561
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002562- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2563 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2564 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2565 case.)
2566
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002567- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2568 passed as unicode strings.
2569
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002570- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2571 See SF bug #683467.
2572
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002573- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2574 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2575
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002576- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2577
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002578- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2579
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002580- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2581 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2582 arguments.
2583
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002584- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2585 See SF bug #667147.
2586
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002587- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002588 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002589 See SF bug #676155.
2590
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002591- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002592 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002593 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2594 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2595 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2596 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2597 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2598 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002599
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002600Extension modules
2601-----------------
2602
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002603- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2604 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2605 tp_as_number pointer.
2606
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002607- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2608 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2609 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2610 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2611 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2612
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002613- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2614
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002615- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2616
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002617- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002618 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002619 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2620 patch #678531.)
2621
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002622- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2623 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2624
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002625- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2626 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2627
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002628- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2629
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002630- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2631 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2632 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2633
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002634- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2635
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002636- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2637 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2638
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002639- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002640
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002641- datetime changes:
2642
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002643 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2644
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002645 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2646 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2647 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2648 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2649 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2650 now.
2651
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002652 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002653 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2654 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002655
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002656 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002657 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002658 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2659 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2660 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2661 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002662
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002663 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2664 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2665 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002666 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2667
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002668 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2669 by a later example coded by Guido.
2670
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002671 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002672 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2673 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2674 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002675 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2676 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2677
2678 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2679 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2680 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2681 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2682 tzinfo subclass instance.
2683
2684 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2685 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2686 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2687 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2688 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2689 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2690 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2691 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002692
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002693 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2694 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2695 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2696 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2697 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002698 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2699
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002700 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002701
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002702 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2703 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2704 as a naive datetime object.
2705
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002706 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2707 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2708 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2709
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002710 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2711 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2712 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2713 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2714 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2715 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2716 comparison.
2717
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002718 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2719 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2720 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2721 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002722 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002723
2724 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002725
2726 and ::
2727
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002728 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2729
2730 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2731 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2732 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2733 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2734
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002735 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2736 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2737 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2738 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2739 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2740
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002741 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2742 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002743 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2744 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002745
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002746Library
2747-------
2748
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002749- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2750 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2751
2752- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2753 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2754 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2755 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2756 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2757 See PEP 307 for details.
2758
2759- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2760 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2761
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002762- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2763 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002764 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002765 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2766 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002767 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002768
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002769- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2770 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2771
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002772- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2773 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2774 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2775
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002776- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2777
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002778- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2779 exception.
2780
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002781- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2782 class.
2783
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002784- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2785 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2786 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2787
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002788- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2789 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2790
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002791- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002792 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2793 See SF bug #659228.
2794
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002795- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2796 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2797 See SF patch #651082.
2798
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002799- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002800
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002801- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2802 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2803
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002804- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002805 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002806
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002807- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2808 DOS paths from other platforms.
2809
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002810Tools/Demos
2811-----------
2812
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002813- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2814 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2815 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2816 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2817 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2818 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2819 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2820 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2821 example:
2822
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002823 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2824 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002825
2826 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2827
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002828
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002829Build
2830-----
2831
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002832- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2833 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2834 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002835 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2836
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002837 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2838
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002839- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2840 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2841 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2842 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2843 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2844 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2845 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2846 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2847 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2848
2849- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2850 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2851 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2852 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2853
2854- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2855 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2856
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002857C API
2858-----
2859
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002860- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2861 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002862
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002863- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2864 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2865 tp_as_number pointer.
2866
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002867- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2868 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2869 (SF #681367)
2870
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002871- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2872 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2873 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2874 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002875
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002876Tests
2877-----
2878
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002879- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002880 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2881 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2882 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2883 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2884 pydoc.)
2885
2886- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2887
2888- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002889
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002890Windows
2891-------
2892
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002893- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2894 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2895 time).
2896
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002897- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2898 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2899
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002900- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2901 release without strong cryptography.
2902
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002903- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002904 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002905
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002906- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2907 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2908
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002909Mac
2910---
2911
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002912- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2913 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002914
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002915- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2916 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2917 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002918
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002919- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2920 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002921
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002922- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2923 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2924 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2925 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002926
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002927- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002928 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2929 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2930 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002931
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002932
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002933What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002934=================================
2935
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002936*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002937
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002938Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002939--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002940
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002941- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2942
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002943- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2944 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002945 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002946 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002947 a different meaning than before.
2948
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002949- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002950 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002951 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002952
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002953- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002954 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002955 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002956
2957- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2958 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2959 and deallocation.
2960
2961- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2962 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2963
2964- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2965 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2966 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2967 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2968 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2969
2970- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2971 now detected by the garbage collector.
2972
2973- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2974 [SF bug 519621]
2975
2976- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2977 identifier.
2978
2979- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2980 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2981 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2982 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2983 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2984 [SF bug 563060]
2985
2986- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2987 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2988 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2989 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2990 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2991
2992- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2993 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2994 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2995
2996- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2997
2998- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2999 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3000 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3001 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3002 state of the slots would be lost.)
3003
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003004Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003005-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003006
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003007- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003008 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3009 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3010 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3011 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003012 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3013 Jython 2.1.
3014
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003015- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003016 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003017 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3018 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3019 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3020 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3021 these, see PEP 302.
3022
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003023- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3024 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3025 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3026
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003027- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3028 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3029 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3030
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003031- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3032 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3033 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3034
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003035- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3036 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3037 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3038 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3039 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3040 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3041 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3042 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3043 releases or implementations.
3044
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003045- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003046 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3047 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003048
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003049- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3050 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3051
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003052- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3053 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3054 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3055
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003056- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3057 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3058
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003059- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3060 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003061 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3062 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003063
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003064- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3065 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3066 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3067 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3068 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3069
3070 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3071 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3072 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3073 pattern.
3074
3075 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3076 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3077 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3078 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3079
3080 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3081 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3082 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3083 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3084 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3085 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3086
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003087- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3088 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3089 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3090 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3091 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3092 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3093 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3094 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003095
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003096- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3097 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3098 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3099 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3100 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003101 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3102 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3103 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3104 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3105 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3106 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3107 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003108
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003109- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3110 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3111
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003112- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3113 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3114 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3115 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3116 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3117 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3118 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3119 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3120 to Zack Weinberg!
3121
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003122- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3123 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3124 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3125 type. This has been fixed now.
3126
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003127- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3128 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3129 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3130
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003131- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3132 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3133 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3134 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3135 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3136 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3137 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3138 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003139 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003140
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003141- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3142 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3143 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003144
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003145- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3146 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3147 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3148 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3149 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3150 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3151 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3152 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003153 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003154 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3155 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3156
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003157- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3158 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3159 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3160 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3161 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3162 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3163 this.)
3164
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003165- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3166 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003167 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003168 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003169 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3170 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003171 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3172 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003173
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003174- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3175 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3176 currently running.
3177
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003178- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3179 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3180 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3181 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3182
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003183- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3184 as directory names.
3185
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003186- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3187 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3188
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003189- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3190 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3191
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003192- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003193 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3194 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003195
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003196- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3197 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3198 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3199 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3200 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3201
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003202- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3203 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3204 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3205 removed.
3206
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003207- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3208 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3209 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3210
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003211- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3212 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3213 to __debug__.
3214
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003215- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3216 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3217 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3218
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003219- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3220 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3221 deprecated now.
3222
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003223- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3224 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3225 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003226
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003227- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3228 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3229 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3230 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3231 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003232
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003233- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3234 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3235
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003236- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3237 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3238 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003239 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003240 is backward compatible.
3241
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003242- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3243 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3244 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3245 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3246 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3247
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003248- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3249 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3250 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3251 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3252 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3253 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003254
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003255- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3256 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3257
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003258- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3259 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3260
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003261- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3262 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3263 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3264 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3265 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3266
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003267- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3268 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3269 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3270
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003271- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003272 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3273
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003274- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3275 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3276 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003277
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003278- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3279 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3280
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003281- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3282 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3283 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3284
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003285- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3286
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003287Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003288-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003289
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003290- Added three operators to the operator module:
3291 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3292 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3293 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3294
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003295- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3296
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003297- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3298 archives.
3299
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003300- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3301 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3302 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3303
3304 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3305
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003306- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3307 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3308 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003309 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003310
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003311- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3312 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3313 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3314 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003315 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3316 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3317 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3318 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003319
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003320- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3321 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003322
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003323- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3324
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003325- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3326 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3327
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003328- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3329 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3330 supported.
3331
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003332- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3333
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003334- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3335 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003336
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003337- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3338 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3339
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003340- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3341
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003342- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3343 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3344
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003345- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3346 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3347 functions but callable type objects.
3348
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003349- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003350 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003351 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003352
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003353- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3354 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003355
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003356- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3357 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003358
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003359- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3360 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3361 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3362 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3363
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003364- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3365 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003366
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003367- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3368 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3369 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3370 and __imul__.
3371
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003372- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003373 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3374 is called.
3375
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003376- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3377 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3378 interpreter was compiled.
3379
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003380- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3381 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3382 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003383 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003384 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3385 1, not 2.
3386
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003387- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3388 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3389 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3390 limit.
3391
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003392- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3393 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3394 bug #623464.
3395
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003396- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3397 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3398 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3399 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3400
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003401Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003402-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003403
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003404- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3405
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003406- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3407 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3408 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3409 with Python 2.3a2.
3410
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003411- os.path exposes getctime.
3412
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003413- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003414 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003415 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003416 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003417 unit tests of floating point results.
3418
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003419- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3420 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3421 has been increased.
3422
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003423- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3424 executed.
3425
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003426- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3427 postinstallation script.
3428
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003429- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3430 test the current module.
3431
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003432- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003433 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3434 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3435 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3436 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3437
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003438- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003439 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003440 Ward's Optik package.
3441
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003442- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3443 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3444 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3445 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3446
3447- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3448 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003449 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003450
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003451- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3452 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3453 shelf are binary pickles.
3454
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003455- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3456 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3457
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003458- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3459 modules are iterators now.
3460
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003461- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3462 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3463 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3464 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3465 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3466 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003467
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003468- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3469 with their entity value.
3470
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003471- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3472
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003473- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3474 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003475
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003476- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3477 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003478 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003479
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003480- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3481 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3482 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3483 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3484 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3485 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3486 main():
3487
3488 import locale
3489 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3490
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003491- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3492 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3493
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003494- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3495 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3496 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3497 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3498 to the new standard.
3499
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003500- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3501 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3502 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3503 an extension to the database.
3504
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003505- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3506 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3507 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3508 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003509 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003510
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003511- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003512 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003513
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003514- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3515 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3516 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3517 bounded integers.
3518
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003519- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3520 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3521 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3522 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3523 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3524 in existence.
3525
3526 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3527 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3528 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3529 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3530 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3531 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3532
3533 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3534 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3535 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3536 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3537
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003538- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3539 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3540 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3541
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003542- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3543
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003544- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3545 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3546 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3547 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3548
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003549- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3550 argument.
3551
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003552- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3553 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3554 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3555 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3556 [SF patch 560794].
3557
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003558- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3559 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3560 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003561 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3562 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3563 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003564
3565- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3566 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003567
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003568- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3569 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3570 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3571 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003572
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003573- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3574 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3575 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3576 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3577 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3578
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003579- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003580
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003581- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3582
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003583- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3584 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3585 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3586 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3587 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3588 identical to None.
3589
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003590- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3591 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3592 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3593 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3594 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3595 results now.
3596
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003597- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3598 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3599
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003600- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3601 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3602 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3603 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3604 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3605 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3606 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3607 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3608
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003609- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3610
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003611- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3612 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3613
3614- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3615 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3616 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3617 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3618 and other systems.
3619
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003620- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3621 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3622 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3623 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 +00003624 work well with these.
3625
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003626- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3627
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003628- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003629 connections.
3630
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003631- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3632 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3633 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3634
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003635- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3636 sets
3637
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003638- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3639 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3640 name.
3641
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003642- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3643 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3644 passed in.
3645
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003646- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003647 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003648 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3649 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003650
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003651- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3652
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003653- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3654
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003655- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3656 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3657 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3658
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003659- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3660 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3661 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3662 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003663 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003664
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003665- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003666 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003667 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003668
3669- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3670 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3671 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3672
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003673- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003674 the value of its expression argument.
3675
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003676- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3677 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3678 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3679
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003680- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3681 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3682 skipstone browser was included.
3683
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003684- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3685 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3686
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003687Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003688-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003689
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003690- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3691 names in addition to accepting file names.
3692
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003693- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3694 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3695 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3696 still used and useful.)
3697
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003698- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3699 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3700 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3701 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003702
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003703- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3704 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3705 the generated binary.
3706
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003707Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003708-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003709
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003710- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3711
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003712- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3713 except in the hands of experts.
3714
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003715- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003716 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3717 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3718 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003719
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003720- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3721 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3722 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3723 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3724 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3725 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3726 builds.
3727
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003728- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3729 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3730 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3731 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3732 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3733 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3734 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3735 new type.
3736
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003737- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003738
3739 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3740 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3741 positive infinities.
3742
3743 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3744 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3745 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3746 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3747 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3748 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3749 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3750
3751 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3752
3753 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3754
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003755- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3756 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3757 size of the executable.
3758
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003759- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3760 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3761 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3762 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003763
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003764- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3765
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003766- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3767 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3768 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003769
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003770- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3771 well as Unix.
3772
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003773- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3774 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3775 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3776 modules in the README file for details.
3777
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003778C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003779-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003780
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003781- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3782 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003783 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003784 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003785 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003786
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003787- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3788 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3789 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3790 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3791 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3792 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003793 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003794 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3795 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3796 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3797 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3798 aligned.)
3799
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003800- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3801 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3802 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3803
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003804- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3805 level.
3806
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003807- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3808 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3809 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3810 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3811 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3812
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003813- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3814 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3815 code.
3816
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003817- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3818 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3819 adjusting for negative indices.
3820
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003821- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3822 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3823 object.
3824
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003825- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3826 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3827 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3828
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003829- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3830 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003831
3832- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3833
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003834- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3835 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3836 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3837 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3838
3839- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3840
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003841- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003842
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003843- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003844 without going through the buffer API.
3845
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003846- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003847
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003848- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3849 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3850 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3851 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3852
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003853- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3854 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3855
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003856- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003857 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3858
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003859New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003860-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003861
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003862- OpenVMS is now supported.
3863
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003864- AtheOS is now supported.
3865
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003866- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3867
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003868- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3869
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003870Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003871-----
3872
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003873- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3874 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3875 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003876
3877Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003878-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003879
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003880- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3881 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3882 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3883 bugs.
3884 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003885 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003886 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3887 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003888 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003889
3890- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003891 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003892
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003893- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3894 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3895
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003896- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3897 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003898 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003899 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3900
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003901- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3902 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3903 use files" uninstall option).
3904
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003905- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3906
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003907- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3908 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3909
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003910- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3911 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3912 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3913
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003914- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3915 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3916 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3917 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3918 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003919 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3920 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3921 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003922
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003923- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003924 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003925 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3926 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3927 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3928 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3929 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3930 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3931 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3932 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3933 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3934 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3935 work around.
3936
3937- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3938 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3939 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3940 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3941 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3942 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3943 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3944 specified with O_CREAT too).
3945
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003946Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003947----
3948
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003949- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003950
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003951- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3952 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3953 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3954
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003955- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3956 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3957 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3958
3959- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3960 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3961 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3962 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3963 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3964 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3965 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3966 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003967
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003968- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3969 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3970 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003971
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003972- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3973 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3974 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3975 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3976 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003977
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003978- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3979 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3980 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003981
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003982- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3983 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003984
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003985- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3986 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3987 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3988 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3989 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003990
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003991- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3992 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3993 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3994
3995- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3996 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3997 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003998
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003999- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4000 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4001 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4002 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004003 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004004
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004005- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4006 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004007
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004008- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4009 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004010
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004011- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004012 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004013 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4014 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004015
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004016
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004017What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004018===============================
4019
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004020*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4021
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004022Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004023--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004024
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004025- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4026 with a custom metaclass.
4027
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004028Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004029-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004030
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004031- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4032 are proxies.
4033
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004034Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004035-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004036
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004037- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4038 very short strings.
4039
4040- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4041 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4042 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4043 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4044 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4045
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004046Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004047-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004048
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004049- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4050 close or delete time).
4051
4052- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4053 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4054
4055- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4056
4057- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004058 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004059
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004060Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004061-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004062
4063Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004064-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004065
4066C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004067-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004068
4069New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004070-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004071
4072Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004073-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004074
4075Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004076-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004077
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004078- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4079
4080- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4081 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4082
4083- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4084 deleted at process exit time.
4085
4086- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4087 in backslash.
4088
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004089Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004090----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004091
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004092- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4093 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4094 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4095
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004096
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004097What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004098===========================
4099
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004100*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4101
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004102Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004103--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004104
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004105- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4106 been extensively updated. See
4107
4108 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4109
4110 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4111
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004112- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4113 deleted!
4114
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004115- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4116 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4117 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4118 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4119 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4120
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004121- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4122
4123 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4124 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4125
4126 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4127 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4128 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4129 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4130 supported anyway.
4131
4132 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4133 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4134
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004135- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4136 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4137 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4138 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4139 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004140
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004141- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4142 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4143 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4144
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004145Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004147
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004148- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4149 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4150 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4151 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4152 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4153 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004154 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4155 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4156 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4157 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004158
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004159- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4160 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4161 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4162
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004163Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004164-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004165
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004166- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4167
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004168Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004169-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004170
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004171- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4172 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4173 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4174 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4175 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4176 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4177
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004178- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4179
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004180- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4181
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004182- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4183
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004184- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4185 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4186 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4187
4188- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4189
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004190Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004191-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004192
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004193- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4194 off a search on Google.
4195
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004196Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004197-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004198
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004199- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4200 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4201 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4202 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4203 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4204 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4205 other platforms should do likewise.
4206
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004207- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4208 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4209 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4210
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004211C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004212-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004213
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004214- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4215 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4216 producing key-value pairs.
4217
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004218- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004219 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004220 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4221 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4222 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4223 previously went unchallenged.
4224
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004225New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004226-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004227
4228Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004229-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004230
4231Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004232-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004233
4234Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004235----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004236
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004237- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4238 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004239
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004240- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4241 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4242 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4243 home.
4244
4245
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004246What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004247===========================
4248
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004249*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4250
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004251Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004252--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004253
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004254- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4255 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004256
4257 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004258 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004259
4260 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4261 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004262 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004263 This needs to be documented.
4264
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004265- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4266 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4267
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004268- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4269 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4270 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4271
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004272- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4273 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4274
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004275- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4276 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4277 class forbids it).
4278
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004279- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4280 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4281 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4282
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004283- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4284
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004285Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004286-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004287
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004288- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4289 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004290 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004291
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004292- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4293 (like 1 + '').
4294
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004295Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004296-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004297
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004298- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4299 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4300 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4301 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004302 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004303 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4304
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004305- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4306 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4307 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4308 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4309
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004310- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4311 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004312 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4313 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4314 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004315
4316- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4317 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004318
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004319- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4320 bytes on its input.
4321
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004322Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004323-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004324
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004325- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004326 convenience function.
4327
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004328- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4329 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4330 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004331 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4332 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4333 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4334 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4335 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4336 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004337
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004338- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4339 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4340 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4341 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4342
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004343- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4344 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4345 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4346
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004347- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4348 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4349 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4350 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4351
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004352- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4353 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004354 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004355 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4356 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4357 new -l and -e options.
4358
4359- statcache is now deprecated.
4360
4361- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4362 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004363 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004364 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4365 time properly taken into account.
4366
4367- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4368 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4369 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4370 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4371
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004372Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004373-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004374
4375Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004376-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004377
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004378- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4379 is built with libdb3 if available.
4380
4381- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4382
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004383C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004384-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004385
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004386- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4387 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4388 PySequence_Size().
4389
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004390- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4391
4392- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4393 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4394 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4395
4396- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4397 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4398
4399- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4400 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4401
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004402New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004403-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004404
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004405- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4406 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4407
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004408- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4409 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4410
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004411- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4412
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004413Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004414-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004415
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004416- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4417 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4418
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004419Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004420-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004421
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004422Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004423----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004424
4425- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4426 removed completely in the next release.
4427
4428- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4429 OSX.
4430
4431- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4432 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4433
4434- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4435
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004436
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004437What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004438===========================
4439
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004440*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4441
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004442Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004443--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004444
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004445- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004446 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004447 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004448 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4449 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004450 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4451 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004452 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4453 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004454
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004455- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4456 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4457
4458- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4459 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4460
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004461Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004462-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004463
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004464- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4465 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4466 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4467 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4468 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4469 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4470 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4471 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4472
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004473- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4474 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4475 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4476 example).
4477
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004478- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004479 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004480 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004481 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004482
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004483- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4484 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4485 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004486 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004487
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004488- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4489 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4490 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4491 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4492 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4493 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4494
4495 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4496
4497 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4498
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004499Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004500-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004501
4502- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4503
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004504- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4505
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004506- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4507 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004508
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004509- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4510 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4511 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4512 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4513 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4514 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004515 attributes.
4516
4517- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4518 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4519 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004520
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004521- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4522 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4523 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004524
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004525- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4526 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4527 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004528 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4529 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4530
4531- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4532 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004533
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004534Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004535-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004536
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004537- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4538 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4539
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004540- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4541 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4542 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4543 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4544
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004545- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4546 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4547 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4548 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4549
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004550 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4551 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4552 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4553 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4554 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4555 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4556 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4557 without losing information).
4558
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004559- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004560 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4561 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4562 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4563 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4564 module).
4565
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004566 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004567 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4568 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4569 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4570 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004571
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004572- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004573 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4574 encoding.
4575
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004576- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4577 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4578
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004579- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004580 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4581
4582- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4583 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4584 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4585 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4586
4587- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4588
4589- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4590 ON, and OFF.
4591
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004592- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4593 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4594
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004595Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004596-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004597
4598- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4599 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4600 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004601
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004602- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4603 been added: -X and -E.
4604
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004605Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004606-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004607
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004608- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4609 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4610
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004611C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004612-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004613
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004614- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4615 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4616 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4617 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4618 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4619
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004620- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4621 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4622 as long) arguments.
4623
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004624- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4625 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4626 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4627 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4628 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4629 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4630
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004631- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4632 input.
4633
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004634New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004635-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004636
4637Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004638-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004639
4640Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004641-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004642
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004643- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4644 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4645 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4646
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004647- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4648 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4649 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004650 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004651
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004652 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4653 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4654 import signal
4655 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004656
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004657 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004658 while 1:
4659 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004660 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004661 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4662 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4663 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4664 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004665
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004666
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004667What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4668===========================
4669
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004670*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4671
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004672Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004673--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004674
4675- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4676 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4677 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4678
4679- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4680 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4681 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4682 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4683 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4684 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4685 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004686
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004687- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004688 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004689 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4690 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4691 associate a docstring with a property.
4692
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004693- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4694 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4695 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4696 other built-in object types.
4697
4698- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4699 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4700 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4701 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4702 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4703
4704- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4705 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4706
4707- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4708 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004709 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004710 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4711 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4712 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4713 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4714 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4715
4716- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4717 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4718 class.
4719
4720- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4721 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4722 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4723 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4724
4725- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4726 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4727 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4728 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4729
4730- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4731 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4732
4733- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4734 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4735 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4736 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4737 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004738 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004739 with the same value as s.
4740
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004741- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4742
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004743Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004744----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004745
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004746- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4747
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004748- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4749 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4750 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4751 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4752 objects.
4753
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004754- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4755 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004756 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4757 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4758
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004759- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4760 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4761 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4762
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004763Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004764-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004765
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004766- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4767 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4768 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4769 by the instances.
4770
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004771- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4772 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4773 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4774
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004775- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4776 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4777 before the entire comparison is complete.
4778
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004779- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4780 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4781 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4782
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004783- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4784 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4785 getwriter().
4786
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004787- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4788 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4789
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004790- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004791 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4792 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4793
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004794- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4795 iterable object.
4796
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004797- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4798 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004799
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004800- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4801 authentication.
4802
4803- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4804 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004805
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004806- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004807 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4808 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4809 a sample driver.)
4810
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004811Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004812-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004813
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004814- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4815 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4816 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4817 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4818 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4819 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4820 kernel has large file support.
4821
4822- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4823 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4824 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4825 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4826 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4827
4828- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4829 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4830 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4831
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004832C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004833-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004834
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004835- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4836 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4837
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004838New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004839-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004840
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004841- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4842 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4843
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004844Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004845-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004846
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004847- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4848 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4849 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4850 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4851 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4852
4853- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4854 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4855 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4856 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4857
4858- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4859 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4860
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004861Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004862-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004863
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004864- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004865 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4866 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004867
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004868
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004869What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4870===========================
4871
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004872*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4873
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004874Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004875----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004876
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004877- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4878 big to represent as a C double.
4879
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004880- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4881 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4882 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4883 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4884 restriction).
4885
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004886- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4887 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4888 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4889 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4890 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4891
4892 >>> dir([])
4893 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4894 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4895 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4896 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4897 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4898 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4899 'reverse', 'sort']
4900
4901 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4902
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004903- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004904 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4905 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4906 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4907 OverflowError exception.
4908
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004909- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004910 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004911 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4912 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4913 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4914 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4915 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004916 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004917 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4918 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4919
4920 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4921 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4922 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4923 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004924
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004925- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004926 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4927 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4928 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4929 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4930 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4931 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4932 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4933 once it is created.
4934
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004935- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4936 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4937 (key, value) pairs.
4938
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004939- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004940 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4941 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4942
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004943- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4944 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4945 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4946 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4947 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004948
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004949- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004950 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4951 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4952
4953 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4954
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004955- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004956 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4957
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004958Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004959-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004960
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004961- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004962 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4963 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004964
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004965- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4966 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4967 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4968 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4969 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4970 in this area anymore).
4971
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004972- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4973 threading.Timer.
4974
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004975- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4976 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4977
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004978- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004979 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4980
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004981- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004982 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4983 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4984 converted to Python longs.
4985
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004986- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004987 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4988
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004989- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4990 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4991 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4992
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004993Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004994-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004995
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004996- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4997 division operators as per PEP 238.
4998
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004999Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005000-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005001
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005002- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5003 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5004 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5005 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5006
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005007C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005008-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005009
5010- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005011
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005012- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5013 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005014 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005015
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005016 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5017 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005018 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005019 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005020
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005021- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005022 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5023 module:
5024
5025 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005026
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005027 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5028 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005029
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005030 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5031 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005032
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005033 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5034
5035 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5036
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005037- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005038 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5039 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5040 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005041
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005042New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005043-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005044
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005045- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5046 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5047 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5048 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5049 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005050
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005051Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005052-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005053
5054Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005055-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005056
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005057- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5058 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5059 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5060 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005061 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5062 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5063 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5064 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5065 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005066
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005067- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005068 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5069
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005070
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005071What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5072===========================
5073
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005074*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5075
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005076Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005077-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005078
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005079- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5080 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5081
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005082- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5083 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5084 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005085
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005086- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5087 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5088 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5089 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005090
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005091- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5092
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005093- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005094
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005095Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005096-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005097
5098- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005099 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005100 the module docstring for details.
5101
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005102Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005103-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005104
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005105- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005106 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5107 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5108 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005109
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005110- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5111 Nick Mathewson.
5112
5113Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005114----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005115
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005116- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5117 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5118 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5119 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5120 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5121 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5122 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5123 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5124
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005125- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5126 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5127 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5128 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5129
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005130- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5131 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5132 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5133 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5134 come a long way).
5135
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005136- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5137 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5138 write filters for these warnings).
5139
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005140- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5141 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5142 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5143 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5144 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5145
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005146- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5147 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5148 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5149 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5150 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5151 older distribution.
5152
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005153Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005154-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005155
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005156- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5157 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005158 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005159
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005160- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5161 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5162 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5163
5164- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5165
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005166- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5167
5168- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5169
5170- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5171
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005172- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005173
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005174- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5175
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005176New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005177-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005178
5179C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005180-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005181
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005182- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5183 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5184 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5185 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5186 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5187 against buffer overruns.
5188
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005189- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005190 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5191 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005192 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5193 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5194 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5195
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005196- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5197 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5198 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5199 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5200 deprecated.
5201
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005202Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005203-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005204
5205- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5206 relevant is found.
5207
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005208
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005209What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005210===========================
5211
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005212*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5213
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005214Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005215----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005216
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005217- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5218 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5219 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5220 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5221 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5222 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5223 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5224 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005225 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005226 repaired.
5227
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005228- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005229 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005230 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5231 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5232 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5233 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5234 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5235 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5236 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5237 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5238
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005239- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5240 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5241 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5242 leading BMO character).
5243
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005244- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5245 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5246 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5247
5248 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5249 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5250 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005251
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005252 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5253 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5254 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5255 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5256 for various simple to use conversions.
5257
5258 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5259 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5260
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005261 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5262 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5263 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5264 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5265 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5266 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5267 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5268 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5269 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5270 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5271 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5272 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5273 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5274 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5275 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005276
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005277- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5278 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5279 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005280 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005281 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005282
5283 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005284 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5285 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5286 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5287 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5288 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005289 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5290 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005291
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005292 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5293 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5294 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005295 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005296
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005297- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5298 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5299 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5300 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5301 floating arithmetic,
5302
5303 x = 9007199254740992.0
5304 print long(x)
5305
5306 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5307 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5308 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5309 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5310 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5311 functions are of good quality).
5312
5313 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5314 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5315 algorithms to break.
5316
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005317- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5318 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5319 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5320 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5321 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5322 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5323 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5324 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5325 order.
5326
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005327- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5328 operation along the most common code paths.
5329
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005330- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5331 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5332
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005333- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5334 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5335 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5336 {}.update(UserDict())
5337
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005338- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5339 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5340 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5341 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5342 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5343 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5344 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5345 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5346
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005347- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005348 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005349
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005350 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005351 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5352 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005353 join() method of strings
5354 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005355 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5356 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005357 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005358 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005359
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005360- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5361 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5362
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005363- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5364 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5365
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005366- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5367 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5368 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5369 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5370
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005371- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5372 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005373 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005374 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5375 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005376
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005377- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5378
5379
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005380Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005381-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005382
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005383- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005384 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005385 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5386 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5387
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005388- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5389 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5390
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005391- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5392 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5393 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5394 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5395
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005396- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5397 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5398 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5399
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005400- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5401
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005402- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5403
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005404- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5405 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5406 that are still imported into string.py).
5407
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005408- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5409
5410- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5411 Now it does.
5412
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005413- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5414
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005415- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5416 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5417 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5418 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5419 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005420 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5421 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005422
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005423- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5424 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5425 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5426 'help(object)'.
5427
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005428Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005429-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005430
5431- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005432 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005433 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5434 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5435
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005436- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005437 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5438 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005439
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005440C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005441-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005442
5443- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5444 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005445
5446----
5447
5448**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**