blob: 02630568ea7c7a537ab5e9ebd10623424bf072be [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Barry Warsaw97f005d2008-12-03 16:46:14 +00007What's New in Python 3.1 alpha 0
8================================
Barry Warsawd8ccd1c2008-11-21 15:13:37 +00009
Antoine Pitrou3ad3a0d2008-12-18 17:08:32 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-200X*
Barry Warsawd8ccd1c2008-11-21 15:13:37 +000011
12Core and Builtins
13-----------------
14
Antoine Pitroub52ec782009-01-25 16:34:23 +000015- Issue #4753: By enabling a configure option named '--with-computed-gotos'
16 on compilers that support it (notably: gcc, SunPro, icc), the bytecode
17 evaluation loop is compiled with a new dispatch mechanism which gives
18 speedups of up to 20%, depending on the system, on various benchmarks.
19
Antoine Pitrou81fabdb2009-01-22 10:11:36 +000020- Issue #4874: Most builtin decoders now reject unicode input.
21
Mark Dickinson9ffc0202009-01-20 20:45:53 +000022- Issue #4842: Don't allow trailing 'L' when constructing an integer
23 from a string.
24
Benjamin Peterson05e782f2009-01-19 15:15:02 +000025- Issue #4991: os.fdopen now raises an OSError for invalid file descriptors.
26
Antoine Pitroue4bc7f62009-01-17 21:06:43 +000027- Issue #4838: When a module is deallocated, free the memory backing the
28 optional module state data.
29
Mark Dickinson8055afd2009-01-17 10:04:45 +000030- Issue #4910: Rename nb_long slot to nb_reserved, and change its
31 type to (void *).
32
Antoine Pitrou8d4e5052009-01-13 22:59:11 +000033- Issue #4935: The overflow checking code in the expandtabs() method common
34 to str, bytes and bytearray could be optimized away by the compiler, letting
35 the interpreter segfault instead of raising an error.
36
Amaury Forgeot d'Arcf343e012009-01-12 23:58:21 +000037- Issue #3720: Fix a crash when an iterator modifies its class and removes its
38 __next__ method.
39
Mark Dickinsone5e298f2009-01-12 20:49:19 +000040- Issue #4910: Builtin int() function and PyNumber_Long/PyNumber_Int API
41 function no longer attempt to call the __long__ slot to convert an object
42 to an integer. Only the __int__ and __trunc__ slots are examined.
43
Martin v. Löwis7c2b66c2009-01-12 08:21:03 +000044- Issue #4893: Use NT threading on CE.
45
Martin v. Löwisec59d042009-01-12 07:59:10 +000046- Issue #4915: Port sysmodule to Windows CE.
47
Antoine Pitrouab868312009-01-10 15:40:25 +000048- Issue #4868: utf-8, utf-16 and latin1 decoding are now 2x to 4x faster. The
49 common cases are optimized thanks to a dedicated fast path and a moderate
50 amount of loop unrolling.
51
Antoine Pitrou14b78f52009-01-09 22:27:08 +000052- Issue #4074: Change the criteria for doing a full garbage collection (i.e.
53 collecting the oldest generation) so that allocating lots of objects without
54 destroying them does not show quadratic performance. Based on a proposal by
55 Martin von Löwis at
56 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-June/080579.html.
57
Vinay Sajip6268cbc2009-01-21 00:19:28 +000058- Issue #4604: Some objects of the I/O library could still be used after
Antoine Pitrou8043cf82009-01-09 19:54:29 +000059 having been closed (for instance, a read() call could return some
60 previously buffered data). Patch by Dmitry Vasiliev.
61
Antoine Pitrou05608432009-01-09 18:53:14 +000062- Issue #4705: Fix the -u ("unbuffered binary stdout and stderr") command-line
63 flag to work properly. Furthermore, when specifying -u, the text stdout
64 and stderr streams have line-by-line buffering enabled (the default being
65 to buffer arbitrary chunks of data).
66
Raymond Hettinger35631532009-01-09 03:58:09 +000067- The internal table, _PyLong_DigitValue, is now an array of unsigned chars
68 instead of ints (reducing its size from 4 to 8 times thereby reducing
69 Python's overall memory).
70
Antoine Pitroud35cbf62009-01-06 19:02:24 +000071- Issue #1180193: When importing a module from a .pyc (or .pyo) file with
72 an existing .py counterpart, override the co_filename attributes of all
73 code objects if the original filename is obsolete (which can happen if the
74 file has been renamed, moved, or if it is accessed through different paths).
75 Patch by Ziga Seilnacht and Jean-Paul Calderone.
76
Antoine Pitrouc3b39242009-01-03 16:59:18 +000077- Issue #4580: Fix slicing of memoryviews when the item size is greater than
78 one byte. Also fixes the meaning of len() so that it returns the number of
79 items, rather than the size in bytes.
80
Martin v. Löwis5c88d812009-01-02 20:47:48 +000081- Issue #4075: Use OutputDebugStringW in Py_FatalError.
82
Amaury Forgeot d'Arc374e2202009-01-01 23:05:36 +000083- Issue #4747: When the terminal does not use utf-8, executing a script with
84 non-ascii characters in its name could fail with a "SyntaxError: None" error.
85
Hirokazu Yamamoto0f22d692009-01-01 16:03:45 +000086- Issue #4797: IOError.filename was not set when _fileio.FileIO failed to open
Hirokazu Yamamoto8ed9a802009-01-01 16:09:52 +000087 file with `bytes' filename on Windows.
Hirokazu Yamamoto0f22d692009-01-01 16:03:45 +000088
Antoine Pitrou7ddda782009-01-01 15:35:33 +000089- Issue #3680: Reference cycles created through a dict, set or deque iterator
90 did not get collected.
91
Nick Coghlanf1f2f682008-12-30 07:29:12 +000092- Issue #4701: PyObject_Hash now implicitly calls PyType_Ready on types
93 where the tp_hash and tp_dict slots are both NULL.
94
Georg Brandlccc47b62008-12-28 11:44:14 +000095- Issue #4759: None is now allowed as the first argument of
96 bytearray.translate(). It was always allowed for bytes.translate().
97
Skip Montanaro80072cb2008-12-23 03:51:14 +000098- Added test case to ensure attempts to read from a file opened for writing
99 fail.
100
Antoine Pitrou51f3ef92008-12-20 13:14:23 +0000101- Issue #3106: Speedup some comparisons (str/str and int/int).
102
Antoine Pitrouf289ae62008-12-18 11:06:25 +0000103- Issue #2183: Simplify and optimize bytecode for list, dict and set
104 comprehensions. Original patch for list comprehensions by Neal Norwitz.
105
Antoine Pitrou621601a2008-12-17 23:18:19 +0000106- Issue #2467: gc.DEBUG_STATS reported invalid elapsed times. Also, always
107 print elapsed times, not only when some objects are uncollectable /
108 unreachable. Original patch by Neil Schemenauer.
109
Mark Dickinson54bc1ec2008-12-17 16:19:07 +0000110- Issue #3439: Add a bit_length method to int.
111
Mark Dickinsonda2706b2008-12-11 18:03:03 +0000112- Issue #2173: When getting device encoding, check that return value of
113 nl_langinfo is not the empty string. This was causing silent build
114 failures on OS X.
115
Jeffrey Yasskinb9083f32008-12-11 06:18:33 +0000116- Issue #4597: Fixed several opcodes that weren't always propagating
117 exceptions.
118
119- Issue #4589: Fixed exception handling when the __exit__ function of a
Amaury Forgeot d'Arc10b24e82008-12-10 23:49:33 +0000120 context manager returns a value that cannot be converted to a bool.
121
Mark Dickinsonfd24b322008-12-06 15:33:31 +0000122- Issue #4445: Replace "sizeof(PyBytesObject)" with
123 "offsetof(PyBytesObject, ob_sval) + 1" when allocating memory for
124 bytes instances. On a typical machine this saves 3 bytes of memory
125 (on average) per allocation of a bytes instance.
126
Christian Heimesa872de52008-12-05 08:26:55 +0000127- Issue #4533: File read operation was dreadfully slow due to a slowly
128 growing read buffer. Fixed by using the same growth rate algorithm as
129 Python 2.x.
130
Antoine Pitrou5504e892008-12-06 21:27:53 +0000131- Issue #4509: Various issues surrounding resize of bytearray objects to
132 which there are buffer exports (e.g. memoryview instances).
133
Georg Brandlf9734072008-12-07 15:30:06 +0000134- Issue #4233: Changed semantic of ``_fileio.FileIO``'s ``close()``
135 method on file objects with closefd=False. The file descriptor is still
136 kept open but the file object behaves like a closed file. The ``FileIO``
137 object also got a new readonly attribute ``closefd``.
Matthias Klose7e1b8fa2008-11-26 17:22:04 +0000138
Antoine Pitroubc420402008-12-07 20:14:49 +0000139- Issue #4569: Interpreter crash when mutating a memoryview with an item size
140 larger than 1.
141
Benjamin Peterson371ccfb2008-12-27 19:03:36 +0000142- Issue #4748: Lambda generators no longer return a value.
143
Barry Warsawd8ccd1c2008-11-21 15:13:37 +0000144Library
145-------
146
Tarek Ziadé4d4456f2009-01-25 18:27:45 +0000147- Issue #4863: distutils.mwerkscompiler has been removed.
148
Jesse Noller41faa542009-01-25 03:45:53 +0000149- Fix and properly document the multiprocessing module's logging
150 support, expose the internal levels and provide proper usage
151 examples.
152
Mark Dickinsoncddcf442009-01-24 21:46:33 +0000153- Issue #1672332: fix unpickling of subnormal floats, which was
154 producing a ValueError on some platforms.
155
Martin v. Löwisacbf4612009-01-24 16:19:45 +0000156- Issue #3881: Help Tcl to load even when started through the
157 unreadable local symlink to "Program Files" on Vista.
158
Martin v. Löwis59e47792009-01-24 14:10:07 +0000159- Issue #4710: Extract directories properly in the zipfile module;
160 allow adding directories to a zipfile.
161
Jesse Noller6fd47e22009-01-23 14:09:08 +0000162- Issue #3807: _multiprocessing build fails when configure is passed
163 --without-threads argument. When this occurs, _multiprocessing will
164 be disabled, and not compiled.
165
Antoine Pitrou08838b62009-01-21 00:55:13 +0000166- Issue #5008: When a file is opened in append mode with the new IO library,
167 do an explicit seek to the end of file (so that e.g. tell() returns the
168 file size rather than 0). This is consistent with the behaviour of the
169 traditional 2.x file object.
170
Vinay Sajip6268cbc2009-01-21 00:19:28 +0000171- Issue #5013: Fixed a bug in FileHandler which occurred when the delay
172 parameter was set.
173
Mark Dickinson8dd05142009-01-20 20:43:58 +0000174- Issue #4842: Always append a trailing 'L' when pickling longs using
175 pickle protocol 0. When reading, the 'L' is optional.
176
Brett Cannonafccd632009-01-20 02:21:27 +0000177- Add the importlib package.
178
Jesse Noller9a0fc972009-01-18 21:12:58 +0000179- Issue #4301: Patch the logging module to add processName support, remove
180 _check_logger_class from multiprocessing.
181
Jesse Noller1cbb17a2009-01-18 19:45:18 +0000182- Issue #3325: Remove python2.x try: except: imports for old cPickle from
Vinay Sajip6268cbc2009-01-21 00:19:28 +0000183 multiprocessing.
Jesse Nollerf70a5382009-01-18 19:44:02 +0000184
Benjamin Peterson9953a8d2009-01-17 04:15:01 +0000185- Issue #4959: inspect.formatargspec now works for keyword only arguments
186 without defaults.
187
Jesse Noller6214edd2009-01-19 16:23:53 +0000188- Issue #3321: _multiprocessing.Connection() doesn't check handle; added checks
189 for *nix machines for negative handles and large int handles. Without this check
190 it is possible to segfault the interpreter.
191
Jesse Nollerb0516a62009-01-18 03:11:38 +0000192- Issue #4449: AssertionError in mp_benchmarks.py, caused by an underlying issue
193 in sharedctypes.py.
194
195- Issue #1225107: inspect.isclass() returned True for instances with a custom
196 __getattr__.
197
Gregory P. Smithde3369f2009-01-12 04:50:11 +0000198- Issue #3826 and #4791: The socket module now closes the underlying socket
199 appropriately when it is being used via socket.makefile() objects
200 rather than delaying the close by waiting for garbage collection to do it.
201
Raymond Hettingerb8baf632009-01-14 02:20:07 +0000202- Issue #1696199: Add collections.Counter() for rapid and convenient
203 counting.
204
Antoine Pitrou308705e2009-01-10 16:22:51 +0000205- Issue #3860: GzipFile and BZ2File now support the context manager protocol.
206
Thomas Heller5e4e4272009-01-08 09:34:20 +0000207- Issue #4867: Fixed a crash in ctypes when passing a string to a
208 function without defining argtypes.
209
Antoine Pitrou42db3ef2009-01-04 21:37:59 +0000210- Issue #4272: Add an optional argument to the GzipFile constructor to override
211 the timestamp in the gzip stream. The default value remains the current time.
212 The information can be used by e.g. gunzip when decompressing. Patch by
213 Jacques Frechet.
214
Mark Dickinson315a20a2009-01-04 21:34:18 +0000215- Restore Python 2.3 compatibility for decimal.py.
216
Guilherme Polo3f5f8222009-01-03 22:00:39 +0000217- Issue #3638: Remove functions from _tkinter module level that depend on
218 TkappObject to work with multiple threads.
219
Vinay Sajip6268cbc2009-01-21 00:19:28 +0000220- Issue #4718: Adapt the wsgiref package so that it actually works with
221 Python 3.x, in accordance with the `official amendments of the spec
Antoine Pitrou38a66ad2009-01-03 18:41:49 +0000222 <http://www.wsgi.org/wsgi/Amendments_1.0>`_.
223
Raymond Hettinger771ed762009-01-03 19:20:32 +0000224- Issue #4796: Added Decimal.from_float() and Context.create_decimal_from_float()
225 to the decimal module.
226
Georg Brandl3a9b0622009-01-03 22:07:57 +0000227- Fractions.from_float() no longer loses precision for integers too big to
228 cast as floats.
229
Mark Dickinsonf9236412009-01-02 23:23:21 +0000230- Issue #4812: add missing underscore prefix to some internal-use-only
231 constants in the decimal module. (Dec_0 becomes _Dec_0, etc.)
232
Georg Brandl3a9b0622009-01-03 22:07:57 +0000233- Issue 4790: The nsmallest() and nlargest() functions in the heapq module
234 did unnecessary work in the common case where no key function was specified.
235
Georg Brandlb1441c72009-01-03 22:33:39 +0000236- Issue #4795: inspect.isgeneratorfunction() returns False instead of None when
237 the function is not a generator.
238
Vinay Sajip6268cbc2009-01-21 00:19:28 +0000239- Issue #4702: Throwing a DistutilsPlatformError instead of IOError in case
240 no MSVC compiler is found under Windows. Original patch by Philip Jenvey.
Tarek Ziadé9df8ce32008-12-30 23:09:20 +0000241
Vinay Sajip6268cbc2009-01-21 00:19:28 +0000242- Issue #4646: distutils was choking on empty options arg in the setup
Tarek Ziadé4450dcf2008-12-29 22:38:38 +0000243 function. Original patch by Thomas Heller.
244
Martin v. Löwis1f1620e2008-12-29 16:27:13 +0000245- Issue #3767: Convert Tk object to string in tkColorChooser.
246
Martin v. Löwise354d782008-12-29 16:03:04 +0000247- Issue #3248: Allow placing ScrolledText in a PanedWindow.
248
Antoine Pitrou5acd41e2008-12-28 14:29:00 +0000249- Issue #4444: Allow assertRaises() to be used as a context handler, so that
250 the code under test can be written inline if more practical.
251
Georg Brandldb7b6b92009-01-01 15:53:14 +0000252- Issue #4739: Add pydoc help topics for symbols, so that e.g. help('@')
253 works as expected in the interactive environment.
254
Antoine Pitroudb5fe662008-12-27 15:50:40 +0000255- Issue #4756: zipfile.is_zipfile() now supports file-like objects. Patch by
256 Gabriel Genellina.
257
Antoine Pitrou180a3362008-12-14 16:36:46 +0000258- Issue #4574: reading an UTF16-encoded text file crashes if \r on 64-char
259 boundary.
260
Nick Coghlanf088e5e2008-12-14 11:50:48 +0000261- Issue #4223: inspect.getsource() will now correctly display source code
262 for packages loaded via zipimport (or any other conformant PEP 302
263 loader). Original patch by Alexander Belopolsky.
264
265- Issue #4201: pdb can now access and display source code loaded via
266 zipimport (or any other conformant PEP 302 loader). Original patch by
267 Alexander Belopolsky.
268
269- Issue #4197: doctests in modules loaded via zipimport (or any other PEP
270 302 conformant loader) will now work correctly in most cases (they
271 are still subject to the constraints that exist for all code running
272 from inside a module loaded via a PEP 302 loader and attempting to
273 perform IO operations based on __file__). Original patch by
274 Alexander Belopolsky.
275
276- Issues #4082 and #4512: Add runpy support to zipimport in a manner that
277 allows backporting to maintenance branches. Original patch by
278 Alexander Belopolsky.
279
Antoine Pitrou7c59bc62008-12-13 23:20:54 +0000280- Issue #4163: textwrap module: allow word splitting on a hyphen preceded by
281 a non-ASCII letter.
282
Lars Gustäbel43fcf3a2008-12-12 14:58:38 +0000283- Issue #4616: TarFile.utime(): Restore directory times on Windows.
284
Benjamin Peterson433f32c2008-12-12 01:25:05 +0000285- Issue #4021: tokenize.detect_encoding() now raises a SyntaxError when the
286 codec cannot be found. This is for compatibility with the builtin behavior.
287
Facundo Batista708d5812008-12-11 04:20:07 +0000288- Issue #4084: Fix max, min, max_mag and min_mag Decimal methods to
289 give correct results in the case where one argument is a quiet NaN
290 and the other is a finite number that requires rounding.
291
Skip Montanaroc1ce2862008-12-06 17:25:02 +0000292- Issue #4483: _dbm module now builds on systems with gdbm & gdbm_compat
293 libs.
294
Georg Brandlf9734072008-12-07 15:30:06 +0000295- Added the subprocess.check_call_output() convenience function to get output
296 from a subprocess on success or raise an exception on error.
297
298- Issue #1055234: cgi.parse_header(): Fixed parsing of header parameters to
299 support unusual filenames (such as those containing semi-colons) in
300 Content-Disposition headers.
301
302- Issue #4384: Added logging integration with warnings module using
303 captureWarnings(). This change includes a NullHandler which does nothing;
304 it will be of use to library developers who want to avoid the "No handlers
305 could be found for logger XXX" message which can appear if the library user
306 doesn't configure logging.
307
308- Issue #3741: DISTUTILS_USE_SDK set causes msvc9compiler.py to raise an
309 exception.
310
Georg Brandleee31162008-12-07 15:15:22 +0000311- Issue #4529: fix the parser module's validation of try-except-finally
312 statements.
313
314- Issue #4458: getopt.gnu_getopt() now recognizes a single "-" as an argument,
315 not a malformed option.
316
317- Added the subprocess.check_output() convenience function to get output
318 from a subprocess on success or raise an exception on error.
319
Amaury Forgeot d'Arcbc9d4742008-12-05 01:40:43 +0000320- Issue #4542: On Windows, binascii.crc32 still accepted str as binary input;
321 the corresponding tests now pass.
322
Amaury Forgeot d'Arcbc2ce572008-12-05 01:02:21 +0000323- Issue #4537: webbrowser.UnixBrowser would fail to open the browser because
324 it was calling the wrong open() function.
325
Fred Drake9a0a65b2008-12-04 19:24:50 +0000326- Issue #1055234: cgi.parse_header(): Fixed parsing of header parameters to
327 support unusual filenames (such as those containing semi-colons) in
328 Content-Disposition headers.
329
Matthias Klose2c7e3ee2009-01-10 17:08:25 +0000330- Issue #4861: ctypes.util.find_library(): Robustify. Fix library detection on
331 biarch systems. Try to rely on ldconfig only, without using objdump and gcc.
332
Antoine Pitrou2a013ea2008-12-27 20:39:28 +0000333Tools/Demos
334-----------
335
336- Issue #4677: add two list comprehension tests to pybench.
337
Georg Brandlb1441c72009-01-03 22:33:39 +0000338
339Build
340-----
341
Martin v. Löwise97637d2009-01-11 09:45:11 +0000342- Issue #4895: Use _strdup on Windows CE.
343
Georg Brandlb1441c72009-01-03 22:33:39 +0000344- Issue #4472: "configure --enable-shared" now works on OSX
345
346- Issues #4728 and #4060: WORDS_BIGEDIAN is now correct in Universal builds.
347
348- Issue #4389: Add icon to the uninstall entry in "add-and-remove-programs".
349
350- Issue #4289: Remove Cancel button from AdvancedDlg.
351
352- Issue #1656675: Register a drop handler for .py* files on Windows.
353
354- Issue #4120: Exclude manifest from extension modules in VS2008.
355
356- Issue #4091: Install pythonxy.dll in system32 again.
357
358- Issue #4018: Disable "for me" installations on Vista.
359
360- Issue #3758: Add ``patchcheck`` build target to .PHONY.
361
362- Issue #4204: Fixed module build errors on FreeBSD 4.
363
364
365C-API
366-----
367
368- Issue #4720: The format for PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords can begin with '|'.
369
370- Issue #3632: from the gdb debugger, the 'pyo' macro can now be called when
371 the GIL is released, or owned by another thread.
372
373- Issue #4122: On Windows, fix a compilation error when using the
374 Py_UNICODE_ISSPACE macro in an extension module.
375
376
Mark Dickinsone675f082008-12-11 21:56:00 +0000377Extension Modules
378-----------------
379
Mark Dickinson29500f62009-01-15 15:36:10 +0000380- Issue #4397: Fix occasional test_socket failure on OS X.
381
Martin v. Löwisa9b54c72009-01-11 09:30:50 +0000382- Issue #4279: Fix build of parsermodule under Cygwin.
383
Antoine Pitroubcd5cbe2009-01-08 21:17:16 +0000384- Issue #4751: hashlib now releases the GIL when hashing large buffers
385 (with a hardwired threshold of 2048 bytes), allowing better parallelization
386 on multi-CPU systems. Contributed by Lukas Lueg (ebfe) and Victor Stinner.
387
Martin v. Löwis5c88d812009-01-02 20:47:48 +0000388- Issue #4051: Prevent conflict of UNICODE macros in cPickle.
389
Antoine Pitrou31f30b12009-01-02 17:34:35 +0000390- Issue #4738: Each zlib object now has a separate lock, allowing to compress
391 or decompress several streams at once on multi-CPU systems. Also, the GIL
392 is now released when computing the CRC of a large buffer. Patch by ebfe.
393
Georg Brandlb1441c72009-01-03 22:33:39 +0000394- Issue #4228: Pack negative values the same way as 2.4 in struct's L format.
395
Martin v. Löwis05bfe1f2008-12-29 18:21:47 +0000396- Issue #1040026: Fix os.times result on systems where HZ is incorrect.
397
Mark Dickinsone675f082008-12-11 21:56:00 +0000398- Issues #3167, #3682: Fix test_math failures for log, log10 on Solaris,
399 OpenBSD.
Amaury Forgeot d'Arcefae8c42008-11-21 23:08:09 +0000400
Antoine Pitrou3ad3a0d2008-12-18 17:08:32 +0000401- Issue #4583: array.array would not always prohibit resizing when a buffer
402 has been exported, resulting in an interpreter crash when accessing the
403 buffer.
404
Martin v. Löwis841edad2008-11-30 10:36:49 +0000405
Brett Cannon7317c1e2008-11-25 19:19:17 +0000406Docs
407----
408
Georg Brandl52b92cc2008-05-25 09:43:03 +0000409
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000410**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**