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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000015- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
16 reference counts in some error exit cases.
17
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000018- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
19 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
20 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
21 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
22 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
23 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
24 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
25 realloc.
26
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000027- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
28 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
29
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000030- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
31 like their int counterparts.
32
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000033- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
34 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
35 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
36 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
37 for a longer write-up of the problem).
38
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000039- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
40 serializing floats.
41
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000042- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
43 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
44 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
45
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000046- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
47 278.
48
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000049- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
50 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
51 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
52 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
53 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
54 PyNumber_*().
55 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
56
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000057- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
58 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
59 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
60 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
61
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000062- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
63 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
64 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
65 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
66 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
67
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000068- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
69 disabled caused a crash.
70
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000071- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
72 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
73
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000074- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000075 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
76
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000077- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
78
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000079- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000080 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
81 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
82 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000083
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000084- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
85
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000086- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
87 returning None.
88
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000089- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000090 ('\') with a specific error message.
91
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000092- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
93
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000094- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
95 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
96
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000097- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000098 an ferror() call.
99
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000100- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
101 list.sort().
102
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000103- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
104 (2+3) --> (5).
105
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000106- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
107
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000108- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
109 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000110
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000111- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
112 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
113 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
114
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000115Extension Modules
116-----------------
117
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000118- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000119 implemented treated all integer values except 1 as false.
120
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000121- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
122
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000123- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
124 if available on the platform.
125
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000126- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
127 available on the platform.
128
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000129- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
130 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
131
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000132- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
133
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000134- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
135 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
136 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
137
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000138- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
139
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000140- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
141 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
142
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000143- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000144 file size.
145
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000146- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
147
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000148- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
149 {remove_history,replace_history}
150
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000151- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
152 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000153
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000154- stat_float_times is now True.
155
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000156- array.array objects are now picklable.
157
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000158- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
159 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
160
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000161- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
162 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
163 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
164
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000165- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
166 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000167
168Library
169-------
170
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000171- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
172 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
173
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000174- textwrap now processes text chucks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
175 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
176
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000177- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
178 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
179
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000180- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
181 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
182
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000183- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
184 though this can be missing in embedded interpreters
185
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000186- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
187
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000188- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
189 error messages.
190
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000191- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
192
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000193- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
194 Bug #1224621.
195
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000196- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
197 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
198 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
199 terminates by raising StopIteration.
200
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000201- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
202
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000203- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
204 component of the path.
205
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000206- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
207 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
208 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
209 class at all.
210
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000211- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
212 files to PyPI.
213
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000214- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
215 them to PyPI.
216
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000217- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
218 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
219 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
220 work as expected.
221
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000222- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
223 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
224
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000225- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000226 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
227
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000228- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
229
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000230- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
231 to build.
232
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000233- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
234 symbolic links on Windows.
235
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000236- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000237 profile.py if available.
238
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000239- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
240
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000241- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
242 in LWPCookieJar.
243
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000244- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
245
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000246- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
247
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000248- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
249
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000250- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
251
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000252- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
253
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000254- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
255
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000256- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
257
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000258- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
259
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000260- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
261 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
262 be exploited in various ways.
263
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000264- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
265
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000266- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
267
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000268- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
269
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000270- Enhancements to the csv module:
271
272 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
273 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000274 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000275 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
276 reporting.
277 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
278 dictates.
279 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000280 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000281 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000282 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
283 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000284 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
285 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000286 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000287 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
288 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
289 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
290 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
291 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
292 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
293 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
294 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
295 without first creating a dialect class.
296 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
297 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
298 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000299 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000300 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
301 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000302 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
303 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
304 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
305 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000306 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
307 This has been fixed.
308
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000309- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
310 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
311 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
312 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
313
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000314- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
315
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000316- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
317 (Bug #951915).
318
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000319- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
320 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
321 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
322 encoding alias table
323
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000324- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
325
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000326- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
327 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
328
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000329- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
330
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000331- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
332
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000333- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
334
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000335- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
336
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000337- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
338
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000339- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
340 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
341 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
342
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000343- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000344 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000345
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000346- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
347 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
348 tokenizer with very long source lines.
349
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000350- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
351 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
352
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000353- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
354 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000355
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000356- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
357 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
358
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000359- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
360 correctly.
361
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000362- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
363 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
364 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
365 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
366 between two lines.
367
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000368
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000369Build
370-----
371
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000372- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
373 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
374 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000375 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000376
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000377- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
378 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
379 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
380
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000381- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
382
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000383- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
384 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
385
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000386- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
387 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
388 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
389 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
390 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
391 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
392 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
393 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
394
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000395- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
396 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
397 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
398 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
399
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000400
401C API
402-----
403
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000404- Removed PyRange_New().
405
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000406
407Tests
408-----
409
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000410- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000411
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000412
413Documentation
414-------------
415
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000416- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
417
418- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
419
420- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
421
422- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
423
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000424- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
425 Closes bug #1166582.
426
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000427- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
428 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
429 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
430
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000431Mac
432---
433
434
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000435New platforms
436-------------
437
438- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
439
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000440
441Tools/Demos
442-----------
443
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000444- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
445
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000446- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000447
448
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000449What's New in Python 2.4 final?
450===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000451
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000452*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000453
454Core and builtins
455-----------------
456
457- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
458 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
459 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
460
461
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000462What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
463==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000464
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000465*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000466
467Core and builtins
468-----------------
469
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000470- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
471 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
472 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
473
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000474
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000475Library
476-------
477
478- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
479 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
480 raised is re-raised.
481
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000482- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
483 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
484
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000485- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
486 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
487 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
488 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
489 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
490 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
491 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
492 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
493 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
494 by the slice are recomputed now.
495
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000496- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000497
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000498Build
499-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000500
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000501- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
502 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
503 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000504
505C API
506-----
507
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000508- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
509
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000510
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000511What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
512================================
513
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000514*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000515
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000516License
517-------
518
519The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
520is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
521changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
522Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
523intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
524durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
525the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
526License::
527
528 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
529
530says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
531to Python 2.1.1.
532
533The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
534License Version 2.
535
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000536Core and builtins
537-----------------
538
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000539- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
540 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
541 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
542 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
543 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
544 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
545 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
546 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
547 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
548 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
549
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000550- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000551
552Extension Modules
553-----------------
554
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000555- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
556 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
557 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
558 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000559
560Library
561-------
562
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000563- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
564 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
565 returned.
566
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000567- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
568
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000569- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
570 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
571
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000572- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
573
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000574- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
575 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000576
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000577- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
578
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000579- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
580
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000581- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000582 the source code is updated and reloaded.
583
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000584Build
585-----
586
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000587- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000588
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000589What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
590================================
591
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000592*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000593
594Core and builtins
595-----------------
596
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000597- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000598 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
599
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000600- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
601 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
602 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
603 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
604
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000605- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
606 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
607
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000608- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
609 constant.
610
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000611- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
612 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
613 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
614 large), and to anomalies such as
615 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
616 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
617 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
618 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000619
620Extension modules
621-----------------
622
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000623- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
624 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000625 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
626 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
627 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000628
629Library
630-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000631
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000632- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000633 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000634 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
635 --swig-cpp.
636
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000637- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
638 it is set.
639
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000640- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000641
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000642- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
643 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
644 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
645 Closes bug #1039270.
646
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000647- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000648
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000649 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000650 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
651 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
652 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
653 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
654 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
655 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
656 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
657 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
658 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
659 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
660 + Updates to documentation.
661
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000662- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
663 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
664 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
665 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
666
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000667- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000668
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000669- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
670 applications should use the getmember function.
671
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000672- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
673
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000674- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
675 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
676 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
677 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
678 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
679 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
680 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
681 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
682 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
683
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000684- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
685 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000686 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000687
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000688- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
689 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
690 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
691 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
692 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
693 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
694 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
695 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000696
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000697- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
698 the new public features (of which there are many).
699
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000700- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000701 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
702 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
703 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
704 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000705 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000706
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000707- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
708
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000709- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
710 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
711 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
712 options.
713
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000714- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
715 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
716 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
717 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
718 conditions under which non-string values work.
719
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000720Build
721-----
722
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000723- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
724 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
725 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
726
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000727- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
728 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
729 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
730 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
731 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000732
733C API
734-----
735
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000736- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
737 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
738
739- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
740
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000741- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
742 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
743 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
744 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
745 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
746 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
747 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
748 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
749 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
750
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000751- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
752
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000753- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
754 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
755 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000756
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000757Tests
758-----
759
760- test__locale ported to unittest
761
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000762Mac
763---
764
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000765- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
766 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
767 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000768
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000769Tools/Demos
770-----------
771
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000772- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
773 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
774 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
775 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
776 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000777
778
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000779What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
780=================================
781
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000782*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000783
784Core and builtins
785-----------------
786
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000787- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000788 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
789
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000790- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
791 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
792 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
793 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
794 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
795 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
796 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
797 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000798 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
799 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
800 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
801 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
802 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000803
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000804- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
805 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
806 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
807 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
808 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
809
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000810- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
811
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000812- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
813 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
814
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000815- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
816 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
817 modified the list.
818
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000819- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
820 functions is now writable.
821
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000822- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
823 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
824 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
825 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
826
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000827- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
828 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
829 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
830 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
831 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000832
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000833- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
834 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
835
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000836Extension modules
837-----------------
838
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000839- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
840
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000841- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
842 data.
843
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000844- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
845 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
846 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
847 supposed to have been truncated away.
848
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000849- Added socket.socketpair().
850
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000851- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
852 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
853
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000854- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000855 versions of Python, have now been removed.
856
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000857Library
858-------
859
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000860- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000861 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000862
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000863- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
864 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
865
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000866- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
867 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
868
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000869- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
870
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000871- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
872 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000873
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000874- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
875 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
876
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000877- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
878
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000879- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
880
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000881- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
882
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000883- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
884 Percivall.
885
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000886- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
887 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
888
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000889- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
890 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
891 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000892 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000893
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000894- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
895 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
896 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
897 and exponent.
898
899- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
900
901- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
902 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
903 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
904
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000905- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
906 to the readline module.
907
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000908- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000909 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
910 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000911
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000912- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
913 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
914 contains symlinks.
915
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000916- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
917 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
918
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000919- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
920 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
921 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
922
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000923- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
924 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
925 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
926 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
927 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
928 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
929 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
930 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
931 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
932 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
933 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
934 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
935 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
936
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000937- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
938
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000939Tools/Demos
940-----------
941
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000942- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
943 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
944
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000945- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
946
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000947Build
948-----
949
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000950- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
951 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
952 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
953 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
954 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
955 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
956 plans to do so.
957
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000958- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
959 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
960
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000961- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
962 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
963
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000964- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
965 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
966
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000967- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
968 GNU/k*BSD systems.
969
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000970- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
971 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
972
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000973C API
974-----
975
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000976..
977
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000978Documentation
979-------------
980
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000981- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
982 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
983
984- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
985 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
986 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000987
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000988New platforms
989-------------
990
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000991- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
992
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000993Tests
994-----
995
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000996..
997
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000998Windows
999-------
1000
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001001- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1002 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1003 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1004 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1005 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1006 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1007 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1008 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1009 the problem.
1010
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001011Mac
1012---
1013
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001014..
1015
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001016
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001017What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1018=================================
1019
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001020*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001021
1022Core and builtins
1023-----------------
1024
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001025- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1026 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1027 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1028 sensitive code.
1029
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001030- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001031 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001032
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001033 @staticmethod
1034 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001035
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001036 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001037
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001038- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1039 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1040 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1041 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1042 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1043 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1044 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1045 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1046 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1047 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1048 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1049
1050 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1051 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1052 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1053 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1054 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1055 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1056 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1057
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001058- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1059 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1060
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001061- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001062 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001063
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001064- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001065 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001066 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1067
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001068- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001069 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1070 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1071
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001072- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1073 types that support garbage collection.
1074
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001075- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1076
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001077- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1078 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1079 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1080 Jython.
1081
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001082- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1083
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001084- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1085 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1086
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001087- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1088 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1089 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001090
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001091- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1092 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1093 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1094
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001095Extension modules
1096-----------------
1097
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001098- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1099
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001100Library
1101-------
1102
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001103- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1104 TIS-620
1105
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001106- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1107 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1108 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1109 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1110 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1111 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1112 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1113 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1114 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1115 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1116
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001117- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1118
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001119- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1120 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1121 same as when the argument is omitted).
1122 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1123
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001124- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1125
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001126- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1127 schemes are offered.
1128
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001129- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1130
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001131- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1132 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1133 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1134
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001135- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1136
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001137- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1138 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1139
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001140- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1141 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1142 when dummy_threading is being used.
1143
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001144- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1145 from a tarfile.
1146
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001147- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001148 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001149
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001150- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1151 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1152 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1153 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1154
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001155- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1156 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1157
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001158- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1159 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1160 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1161 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1162 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1163 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1164 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1165 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1166 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1167 by some other method in progress).
1168
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001169- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1170 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1171 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001172
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001173- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1174
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001175- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1176 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1177 AM Kuchling.
1178
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001179- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1180 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1181 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1182
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001183- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1184 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1185 instead of unsigned.
1186
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001187- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001188 no longer part of the public API.
1189
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001190- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1191 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1192 string methods of the same name).
1193
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001194- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001195 SF patch 945642.
1196
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001197- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1198
1199 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1200
1201 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1202 DocTestSuites.
1203
1204- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1205 that provide thread-local data.
1206
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001207- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1208 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1209
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001210- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1211
1212- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1213 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1214 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1215
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001216- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1217
1218 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1219 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1220 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001221
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001222 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1223 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1224 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1225 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1226
1227 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1228 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1229
1230 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1231 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1232 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1233 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1234
1235 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1236 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1237 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1238 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1239 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1240
1241 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1242 wrapping help output.
1243
1244 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1245 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1246 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001247
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001248C API
1249-----
1250
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001251- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1252 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1253 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1254 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1255 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1256 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1257 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1258 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1259 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1260 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1261 its visible semantics have not changed.
1262
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001263- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1264 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1265
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001266Documentation
1267-------------
1268
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001269- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001270
1271 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001272 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001273
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001274 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001275
1276 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1277
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001278- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001279
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001280Tests
1281-----
1282
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001283- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001284 platforms that use the Makefile.
1285
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001286- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1287 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1288 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1289
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001290
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001291What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1292=================================
1293
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001294*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001295
1296Core and builtins
1297-----------------
1298
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001299- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1300 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1301 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1302 objects now (one object instead of three).
1303
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001304- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1305 Windows DLLs.
1306
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001307- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1308 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001309
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001310- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1311 a new .pyc magic.
1312
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001313- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1314 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1315 be there.
1316
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001317- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1318 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1319 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1320
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001321- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1322 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1323 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1324
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001325- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1326
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001327- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1328 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1329 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001330
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001331- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1332 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1333
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001334- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1335
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001336- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001337 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001338
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001339- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1340
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001341- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1342
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001343- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1344 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1345
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001346- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1347 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1348 Fixes bug #858016 .
1349
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001350- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1351 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1352 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1353
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001354- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1355 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1356 improves their performance (about 35%).
1357
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001358- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1359 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1360 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1361
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001362- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1363 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1364 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1365 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1366
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001367- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1368 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001369 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001370 length is not known).
1371
1372- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1373 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001374 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1375 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001376 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1377
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001378- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1379 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1380
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001381- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1382 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1383 keyword arguments.
1384
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001385- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1386 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1387 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1388
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001389- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1390 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1391 cases.
1392
1393- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1394 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1395 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1396 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1397 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1398 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1399 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1400 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1401 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1402 a release build.
1403
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001404- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1405 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1406
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001407- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001408 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001409
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001410- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1411 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1412 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1413 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1414 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1415 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1416 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1417 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1418 destroyed.
1419
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001420- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1421 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1422 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1423 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1424 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1425 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1426 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1427 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1428
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001429- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1430 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1431 character other than a space.
1432
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001433- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1434 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1435 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1436 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1437 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1438 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1439 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1440 attributes with the same name.
1441
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001442- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1443 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1444 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1445 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1446 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1447 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1448 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1449 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1450 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1451 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1452 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1453 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1454 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1455 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001456
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001457- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1458 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1459 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1460 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1461 This has been repaired.
1462
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001463- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1464
1465- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1466
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001467- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1468 over a sequence.
1469
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001470- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001471 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001472
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001473- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1474
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001475- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1476 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1477 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1478 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1479 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1480 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1481 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1482 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1483
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001484- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1485 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1486 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1487
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001488- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1489 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1490 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1491 freelist.
1492
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001493- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1494 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1495
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001496- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1497 number.
1498
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001499- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1500 a TypeError exception.
1501
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001502- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1503 820195.
1504
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001505- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1506 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1507 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1508
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001509- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001510 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1511 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001512
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001513- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1514 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1515 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1516
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001517- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1518 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001519 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001520
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001521- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001522 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1523 the first call.
1524
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001525
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001526Extension modules
1527-----------------
1528
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001529- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1530 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1531
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001532- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1533 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1534 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1535 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1536 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1537 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1538 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001539
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001540- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1541
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001542- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1543
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001544- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1545 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1546
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001547- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1548 fewer false positives.
1549
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001550- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1551 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1552
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001553- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001554 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1555
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001556- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001557 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001558 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001559 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1560 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001561
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001562- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1563 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1564 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1565 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1566
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001567- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1568 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1569 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1570 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1571 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1572 #897625.
1573
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001574- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1575 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1576
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001577- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1578 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1579 and pops on either side of the deque.
1580
1581- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1582 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1583
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001584- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1585 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1586 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1587 other functions that expect a function argument.
1588
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001589- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1590
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001591- os.getsid was added.
1592
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001593- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1594 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1595 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1596
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001597- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1598
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001599- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1600
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001601- readline.clear_history was added.
1602
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001603- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1604
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001605- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1606
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001607- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1608
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001609- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1610
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001611- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1612
1613- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1614
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001615- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1616
1617- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1618
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001619- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1620 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1621 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1622
1623- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1624 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1625 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1626 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1627 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1628 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1629 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1630
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001631- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1632 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1633 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1634 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001635
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001636- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001637 iterators from a single iterable.
1638
1639- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1640 of raising a TypeError exception.
1641
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001642- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1643 as parameter.
1644
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001645Library
1646-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001647
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001648- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1649 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1650 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001651
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001652- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1653 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1654 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001655
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001656- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001657
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001658- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1659 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001660
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001661- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1662 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1663
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001664- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1665
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001666- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001667 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001668
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001669- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001670 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001671
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001672- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1673
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001674- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1675 on cygwin and mingw32.
1676
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001677- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1678
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001679- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1680 module.
1681
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001682- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1683 installation scheme for all platforms.
1684
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001685- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001686 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001687
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001688- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1689 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1690 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1691
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001692- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1693 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1694 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1695
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001696- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1697
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001698- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1699
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001700- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1701 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1702
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001703- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1704 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1705 type pattern with the same value exists.
1706
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001707- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1708 when run from the command prompt).
1709
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001710- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1711 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1712
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001713- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1714 default sort).
1715
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001716- Added global runctx function to profile module
1717
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001718- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1719
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001720- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1721
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001722- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1723
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001724- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001725 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1726 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1727 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1728 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1729 accordingly.
1730
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001731- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1732 decoding standards.
1733
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001734- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1735 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1736 called for all requests.
1737
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001738- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1739 they are passed to the compiler.
1740
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001741- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1742 indent, width and depth.
1743
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001744- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1745 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1746
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001747- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1748 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1749
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001750- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1751
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001752- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1753
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001754- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1755
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001756- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1757 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1758
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001759- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001760 for better performance.
1761
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001762- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001763
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001764- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1765 a string).
1766
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001767- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1768
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001769- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1770
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001771- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1772
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001773- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1774
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001775- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1776 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1777 list of fieldnames.
1778
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001779- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1780 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1781
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001782- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1783
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001784- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1785 empty lists.
1786
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001787- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1788 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1789 and shelves.
1790
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001791- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1792 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1793
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001794- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001795 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1796 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001797
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001798- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1799 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001800 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001801
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001802- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001803 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1804 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1805
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001806- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1807 and removed in Py2.4.
1808
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001809- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1810
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001811- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1812
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001813Tools/Demos
1814-----------
1815
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001816- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1817 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1818
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001819- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1820
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001821- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1822 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1823 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1824 destination in situations where both files are given.
1825
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001826- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1827 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1828 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1829 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1830
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001831- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1832
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001833- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1834 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1835 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1836 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1837 now.
1838
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001839- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1840 in effect
1841
1842- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1843 C-c C-h
1844
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001845- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1846 -d option was given.
1847
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001848Build
1849-----
1850
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001851- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1852 build under OS X.
1853
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001854- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1855 --enable-profiling.
1856
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001857- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1858 is configured --with-tsc.
1859
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001860- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1861 on AMD64.
1862
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001863- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1864 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1865
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001866- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1867 removed.
1868
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001869- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1870 supported (see PEP 11).
1871
1872- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1873
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001874- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1875
1876- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1877 (see PEP 11).
1878
1879- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1880 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1881
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001882C API
1883-----
1884
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001885- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1886 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1887 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1888
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001889- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1890 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1891 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1892 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1893
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001894- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1895 generator objects.
1896
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001897- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1898 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001899 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1900 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001901
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001902- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1903 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1904
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001905- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1906 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1907 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1908 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1909 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1910
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001911- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1912 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1913 about 10% faster.
1914
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001915- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1916 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1917
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001918- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1919 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1920 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1921 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1922
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001923Windows
1924-------
1925
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001926- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1927 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1928 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1929 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1930
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001931- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1932 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1933 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1934
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001935
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001936What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1937===============================
1938
1939*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1940
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001941IDLE
1942----
1943
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001944- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1945 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1946 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1947 context-menu actions.
1948
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001949- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1950 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1951 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1952 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1953 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1954 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1955 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1956 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1957 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1958
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001959
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001960What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1961=============================================
1962
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001963*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001964
1965Core and builtins
1966-----------------
1967
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001968- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001969 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001970 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1971
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001972Extension modules
1973-----------------
1974
1975- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1976 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1977 than once. This has been fixed.
1978
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001979- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1980 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1981 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1982 call.
1983
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001984- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1985
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001986Library
1987-------
1988
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001989- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1990 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1991
1992- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1993 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1994 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1995 restored.
1996
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001997IDLE
1998----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001999
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002000- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002001
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002002Build
2003-----
2004
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002005- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2006 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2007
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002008C API
2009-----
2010
2011Windows
2012-------
2013
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002014- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2015 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2016
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002017- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2018
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002019Mac
2020---
2021
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002022- Various fixes to pimp.
2023
2024- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2025
2026- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2027 more problems than it solves.
2028
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002029
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002030What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2031=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002032
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002033*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2034
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002035Core and builtins
2036-----------------
2037
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002038- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2039 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2040
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002041- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2042 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002043 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002044
2045- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2046 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2047 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002048 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002049
2050- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2051 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002052
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002053- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2054 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2055 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2056
2057- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002058 770247.
2059
2060- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002061
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002062Extension modules
2063-----------------
2064
2065- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2066 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2067
2068- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2069
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002070- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2071
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002072- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2073 contained within the _strptime module.
2074
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002075- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2076 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2077
2078- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002079 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2080
2081- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2082 the find_class attribute, if present.
2083
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002084- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002085
2086 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2087 (SF bug 763298).
2088
2089 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002090 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2091 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2092 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002093
2094 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2095
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002096Library
2097-------
2098
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002099- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2100
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002101- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2102 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2103 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2104 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2105 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2106 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2107 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2108 or Tester().
2109
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002110- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2111 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2112 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2113 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2114 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2115 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2116 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2117 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2118 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002119
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002120 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002121
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002122- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2123 weren't before was an oversight.
2124
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002125- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2126 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2127
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002128- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2129 when there are no lines.
2130
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002131- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2132 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2133
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002134- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2135 to child processes.
2136
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002137- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2138
2139- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2140
2141- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2142 xmlrpclib.
2143
2144- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2145 responses.
2146
2147- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2148 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2149
2150- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2151 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2152 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2153
2154- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2155 used as patterns.
2156
2157- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2158 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2159 than Tk 8.3.
2160
2161- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2162
2163- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002164
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002165Tools/Demos
2166-----------
2167
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002168- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2169
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002170- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2171
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002172- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002173
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002174Build
2175-----
2176
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002177- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2178
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002179- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2180
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002181- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2182 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002183
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002184- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2185 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2186 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002187
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002188C API
2189-----
2190
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002191- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2192 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2193
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002194Windows
2195-------
2196
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002197- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2198 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2199 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2200 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2201 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2202 Python exception ::
2203
2204 thread.error: can't start new thread
2205
2206 is raised now.
2207
2208- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2209 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2210 instead of from DLL teardown.
2211
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002212Mac
2213---
2214
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002215- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002216 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002217 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2218 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2219 the executable in the bundle.
2220
2221- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002222
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002223- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2224
2225- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2226 on Panther.
2227
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002228What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2229================================
2230
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002231*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002232
2233Core and builtins
2234-----------------
2235
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002236- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2237 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2238 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2239 with the -i option.
2240
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002241- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2242 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2243
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002244- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2245 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2246
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002247- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2248 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2249 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2250 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2251 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2252 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2253 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2254 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2255 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2256 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2257 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2258 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2259 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002260
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002261- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2262 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2263 embedded in a lambda expression.
2264
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002265- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2266 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2267 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2268 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2269 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2270
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002271- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2272 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2273 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2274
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002275- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2276 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2277
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002278- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2279 It's writable again.
2280
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002281- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2282 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2283 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002284 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002285
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002286- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2287 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2288 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2289
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002290Extension modules
2291-----------------
2292
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002293- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2294 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2295
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002296- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2297 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2298 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2299 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2300
2301- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2302 collection.
2303
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002304- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2305 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2306 unique within a single program run.
2307
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002308- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2309 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2310
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002311- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2312 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2313
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002314- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2315 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002316
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002317- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2318
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002319- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2320 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2321
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002322- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2323 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2324 for many BSD-derived systems.
2325
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002326
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002327Library
2328-------
2329
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002330- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2331 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2332 primary ones:
2333
2334 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2335 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2336 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2337
2338 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2339 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2340 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2341 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2342 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2343 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2344
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002345- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2346 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2347 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2348 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2349 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2350 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2351 argument.
2352
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002353- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2354 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2355 in the archive.
2356
2357- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2358 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2359
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002360- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2361 569574).
2362
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002363- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2364 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2365 no more.
2366
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002367- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2368 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2369 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2370 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2371 code coverage.
2372
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002373- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2374 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2375 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002376 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2377 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002378
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002379- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2380 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2381 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002382 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002383
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002384- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2385
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002386- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2387 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2388 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2389 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2390
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002391- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2392 handling.
2393
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002394- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2395 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2396
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002397- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2398 in socket.py.
2399
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002400- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2401
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002402- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2403 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2404 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2405 opener with proxy support.
2406
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002407- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2408
2409- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2410
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002411Tools/Demos
2412-----------
2413
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002414- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2415
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002416- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2417
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002418- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2419 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002420
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002421- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2422 files.
2423
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002424Build
2425-----
2426
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002427- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002428 different root directory.
2429
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002430C API
2431-----
2432
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002433- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2434 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2435 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2436 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2437 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2438 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2439 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2440 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2441 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2442 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2443
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002444- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2445 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2446 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2447 from Python.
2448
2449
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002450New platforms
2451-------------
2452
2453None this time.
2454
2455Tests
2456-----
2457
2458- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2459 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2460
2461Windows
2462-------
2463
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002464- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2465
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002466- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2467 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2468 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2469 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2470 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2471 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2472 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2473 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2474 that's what it's for.
2475
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002476Mac
2477---
2478
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002479- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2480 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2481 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2482 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002483- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2484 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2485- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002486
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002487SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2488------------------------------------
2489
2490430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2491598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2492622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2493661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2494683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2495697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2496713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2497724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2498727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2499729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2500730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2501731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2502732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2503733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2504735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2505740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2506744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2507745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2508747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2509749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2510751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2511753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2512755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2513757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2514760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2515
2516
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002517What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2518================================
2519
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002520*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002521
2522Core and builtins
2523-----------------
2524
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002525- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2526 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2527
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002528- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2529 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2530 and cannot be strings).
2531
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002532- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2533 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2534 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2535 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2536
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002537- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2538 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2539 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2540 Python itself.
2541
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002542- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2543 the referenced object, if it has one.
2544
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002545- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2546 the thread started at
2547 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2548
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002549- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2550 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2551 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2552 placed on a list index.
2553
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002554- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2555 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2556 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2557 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2558
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002559- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2560 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2561 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2562 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2563 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2564 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2565 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2566
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002567- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2568 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2569 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2570 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2571 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2572
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002573- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2574 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002575
2576- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2577 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2578 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2579 #693195.)
2580
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002581- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2582 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002583
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002584- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002585 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002586 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2587 interpreter executions, would fail.
2588
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002589- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002590 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002591 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002592
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002593Extension modules
2594-----------------
2595
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002596- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2597 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2598 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2599 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2600
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002601- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2602 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2603
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002604- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2605 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2606 and Greg Chapman.)
2607
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002608- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2609 recursively.
2610
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002611- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002612 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2613 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2614 leaks.
2615
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002616- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2617
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002618- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2619 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2620 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2621 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2622 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2623 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2624 #705836.
2625
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002626- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002627 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2628
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002629- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2630 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2631 See SF bug #692416.
2632
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002633- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2634 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2635
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002636- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2637 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2638 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002639
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002640- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002641 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2642 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2643
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002644- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2645 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2646 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2647 timeouts to work properly.
2648
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002649Library
2650-------
2651
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002652- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2653 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2654 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2655 future release.
2656
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002657- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2658 for querying platform dependent features.
2659
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002660- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002661
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002662- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2663 pickle protocol versions.
2664
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002665- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2666 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2667 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2668
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002669- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2670
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002671- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2672 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2673 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2674 modules.
2675
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002676- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2677 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2678 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2679
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002680- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2681 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2682
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002683- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2684 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2685 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2686
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002687- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002688 MS Office extensions.
2689
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002690- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2691 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2692
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002693- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2694 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2695
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002696- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2697 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2698 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2699 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2700 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2701 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2702
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002703- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2704 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2705 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002706
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002707- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2708 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2709 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2710
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002711- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2712
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002713- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2714 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2715 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2716
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002717Tools/Demos
2718-----------
2719
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002720- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2721 See the module docstring for details.
2722
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002723Build
2724-----
2725
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002726- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2727 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002728
2729C API
2730-----
2731
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002732- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2733
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002734- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2735 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2736 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2737
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002738- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2739 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002740
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002741 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2742 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2743 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002744
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002745- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002746 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2747
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002748- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2749 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2750 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002751
2752New platforms
2753-------------
2754
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002755None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002756
2757Tests
2758-----
2759
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002760- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2761 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002762
2763Windows
2764-------
2765
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002766- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2767 function.
2768
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002769- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2770 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002771
2772Mac
2773---
2774
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002775- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2776 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002777
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002778- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2779 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002780
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002781- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2782 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2783 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002784
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002785- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002786 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2787 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002788
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002789- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2790 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002791
2792
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002793What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2794=================================
2795
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002796*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002797
2798Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002799-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002800
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002801- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2802 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2803 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2804
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002805- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2806 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2807 (SF patch #664376.)
2808
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002809- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2810 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2811 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2812 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2813 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2814 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002815 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002816
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002817- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2818 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2819 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2820 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002821 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002822
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002823- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2824 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2825 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2826 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2827 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2828 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2829 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2830 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2831 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2832 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2833 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2834
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002835- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2836 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2837 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2838 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2839 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2840 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2841
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002842- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2843 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2844
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002845- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2846 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2847 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2848 case.)
2849
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002850- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2851 passed as unicode strings.
2852
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002853- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2854 See SF bug #683467.
2855
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002856- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2857 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2858
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002859- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2860
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002861- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2862
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002863- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2864 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2865 arguments.
2866
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002867- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2868 See SF bug #667147.
2869
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002870- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002871 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002872 See SF bug #676155.
2873
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002874- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002875 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002876 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2877 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2878 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2879 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2880 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2881 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002882
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002883Extension modules
2884-----------------
2885
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002886- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2887 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2888 tp_as_number pointer.
2889
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002890- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2891 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2892 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2893 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2894 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2895
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002896- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2897
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002898- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2899
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002900- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002901 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002902 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2903 patch #678531.)
2904
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002905- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2906 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2907
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002908- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2909 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2910
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002911- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2912
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002913- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2914 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2915 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2916
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002917- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2918
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002919- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2920 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2921
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002922- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002923
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002924- datetime changes:
2925
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002926 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2927
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002928 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2929 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2930 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2931 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2932 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2933 now.
2934
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002935 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002936 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2937 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002938
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002939 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002940 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002941 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2942 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2943 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2944 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002945
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002946 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2947 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2948 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002949 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2950
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002951 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2952 by a later example coded by Guido.
2953
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002954 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002955 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2956 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2957 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002958 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2959 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2960
2961 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2962 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2963 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2964 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2965 tzinfo subclass instance.
2966
2967 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2968 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2969 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2970 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2971 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2972 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2973 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2974 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002975
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002976 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2977 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2978 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2979 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2980 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002981 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2982
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002983 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002984
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002985 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2986 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2987 as a naive datetime object.
2988
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002989 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2990 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2991 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2992
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002993 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2994 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2995 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2996 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2997 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2998 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2999 comparison.
3000
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003001 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3002 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3003 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3004 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003005 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003006
3007 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003008
3009 and ::
3010
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003011 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3012
3013 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3014 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3015 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3016 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3017
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003018 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3019 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3020 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3021 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3022 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3023
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003024 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3025 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003026 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3027 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003028
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003029Library
3030-------
3031
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003032- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3033 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3034
3035- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3036 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3037 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3038 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3039 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3040 See PEP 307 for details.
3041
3042- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3043 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3044
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003045- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3046 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003047 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003048 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3049 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003050 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003051
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003052- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3053 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3054
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003055- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3056 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3057 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3058
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003059- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3060
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003061- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3062 exception.
3063
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003064- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3065 class.
3066
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003067- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3068 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3069 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3070
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003071- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3072 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3073
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003074- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003075 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3076 See SF bug #659228.
3077
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003078- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3079 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3080 See SF patch #651082.
3081
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003082- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003083
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003084- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3085 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3086
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003087- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003088 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003089
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003090- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3091 DOS paths from other platforms.
3092
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003093Tools/Demos
3094-----------
3095
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003096- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3097 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3098 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3099 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3100 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3101 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3102 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3103 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3104 example:
3105
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003106 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3107 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003108
3109 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3110
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003111
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003112Build
3113-----
3114
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003115- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3116 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3117 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003118 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3119
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003120 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3121
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003122- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3123 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3124 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3125 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3126 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3127 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3128 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3129 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3130 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3131
3132- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3133 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3134 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3135 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3136
3137- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3138 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3139
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003140C API
3141-----
3142
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003143- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3144 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003145
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003146- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3147 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3148 tp_as_number pointer.
3149
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003150- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3151 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3152 (SF #681367)
3153
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003154- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3155 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3156 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3157 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003158
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003159Tests
3160-----
3161
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003162- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003163 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3164 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3165 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3166 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3167 pydoc.)
3168
3169- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3170
3171- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003172
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003173Windows
3174-------
3175
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003176- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3177 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3178 time).
3179
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003180- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3181 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3182
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003183- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3184 release without strong cryptography.
3185
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003186- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003187 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003188
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003189- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3190 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3191
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003192Mac
3193---
3194
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003195- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3196 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003197
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003198- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3199 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3200 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003201
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003202- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3203 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003204
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003205- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3206 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3207 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3208 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003209
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003210- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003211 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3212 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3213 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003214
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003215
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003216What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003217=================================
3218
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003219*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003220
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003221Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003222--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003223
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003224- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3225
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003226- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3227 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003228 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003229 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003230 a different meaning than before.
3231
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003232- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003233 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003234 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003235
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003236- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003237 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003238 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003239
3240- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3241 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3242 and deallocation.
3243
3244- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3245 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3246
3247- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3248 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3249 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3250 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3251 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3252
3253- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3254 now detected by the garbage collector.
3255
3256- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3257 [SF bug 519621]
3258
3259- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3260 identifier.
3261
3262- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3263 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3264 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3265 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3266 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3267 [SF bug 563060]
3268
3269- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3270 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3271 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3272 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3273 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3274
3275- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3276 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3277 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3278
3279- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3280
3281- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3282 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3283 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3284 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3285 state of the slots would be lost.)
3286
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003287Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003288-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003289
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003290- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003291 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3292 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3293 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3294 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003295 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3296 Jython 2.1.
3297
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003298- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003299 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003300 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3301 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3302 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3303 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3304 these, see PEP 302.
3305
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003306- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3307 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3308 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3309
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003310- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3311 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3312 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3313
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003314- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3315 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3316 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3317
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003318- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3319 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3320 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3321 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3322 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3323 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3324 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3325 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3326 releases or implementations.
3327
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003328- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003329 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3330 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003331
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003332- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3333 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3334
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003335- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3336 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3337 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3338
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003339- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3340 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3341
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003342- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3343 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003344 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3345 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003346
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003347- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3348 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3349 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3350 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3351 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3352
3353 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3354 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3355 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3356 pattern.
3357
3358 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3359 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3360 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3361 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3362
3363 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3364 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3365 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3366 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3367 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3368 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3369
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003370- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3371 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3372 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3373 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3374 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3375 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3376 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3377 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003378
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003379- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3380 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3381 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3382 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3383 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003384 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3385 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3386 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3387 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3388 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3389 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3390 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003391
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003392- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3393 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3394
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003395- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3396 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3397 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3398 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3399 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3400 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3401 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3402 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3403 to Zack Weinberg!
3404
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003405- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3406 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3407 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3408 type. This has been fixed now.
3409
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003410- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3411 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3412 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3413
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003414- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3415 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3416 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3417 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3418 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3419 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3420 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3421 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003422 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003423
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003424- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3425 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3426 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003427
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003428- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3429 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3430 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3431 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3432 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3433 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3434 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3435 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003436 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003437 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3438 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3439
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003440- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3441 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3442 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3443 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3444 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3445 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3446 this.)
3447
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003448- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3449 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003450 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003451 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003452 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3453 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003454 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3455 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003456
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003457- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3458 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3459 currently running.
3460
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003461- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3462 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3463 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3464 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3465
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003466- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3467 as directory names.
3468
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003469- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3470 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3471
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003472- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3473 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3474
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003475- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003476 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3477 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003478
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003479- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3480 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3481 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3482 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3483 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3484
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003485- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3486 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3487 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3488 removed.
3489
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003490- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3491 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3492 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3493
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003494- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3495 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3496 to __debug__.
3497
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003498- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3499 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3500 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3501
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003502- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3503 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3504 deprecated now.
3505
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003506- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3507 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3508 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003509
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003510- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3511 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3512 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3513 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3514 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003515
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003516- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3517 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3518
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003519- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3520 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3521 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003522 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003523 is backward compatible.
3524
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003525- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3526 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3527 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3528 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3529 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3530
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003531- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3532 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3533 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3534 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3535 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3536 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003537
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003538- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3539 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3540
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003541- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3542 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3543
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003544- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3545 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3546 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3547 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3548 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3549
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003550- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3551 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3552 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3553
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003554- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003555 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3556
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003557- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3558 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3559 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003560
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003561- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3562 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3563
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003564- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3565 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3566 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3567
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003568- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3569
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003570Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003571-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003572
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003573- Added three operators to the operator module:
3574 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3575 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3576 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3577
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003578- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3579
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003580- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3581 archives.
3582
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003583- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3584 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3585 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3586
3587 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3588
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003589- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3590 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3591 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003592 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003593
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003594- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3595 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3596 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3597 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003598 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3599 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3600 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3601 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003602
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003603- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3604 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003605
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003606- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3607
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003608- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3609 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3610
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003611- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3612 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3613 supported.
3614
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003615- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3616
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003617- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3618 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003619
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003620- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3621 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3622
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003623- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3624
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003625- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3626 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3627
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003628- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3629 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3630 functions but callable type objects.
3631
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003632- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003633 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003634 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003635
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003636- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3637 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003638
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003639- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3640 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003641
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003642- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3643 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3644 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3645 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3646
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003647- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3648 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003649
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003650- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3651 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3652 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3653 and __imul__.
3654
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003655- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003656 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3657 is called.
3658
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003659- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3660 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3661 interpreter was compiled.
3662
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003663- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3664 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3665 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003666 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003667 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3668 1, not 2.
3669
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003670- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3671 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3672 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3673 limit.
3674
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003675- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3676 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3677 bug #623464.
3678
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003679- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3680 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3681 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3682 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3683
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003684Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003685-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003686
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003687- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3688
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003689- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3690 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3691 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3692 with Python 2.3a2.
3693
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003694- os.path exposes getctime.
3695
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003696- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003697 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003698 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003699 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003700 unit tests of floating point results.
3701
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003702- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3703 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3704 has been increased.
3705
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003706- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3707 executed.
3708
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003709- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3710 postinstallation script.
3711
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003712- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3713 test the current module.
3714
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003715- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003716 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3717 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3718 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3719 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3720
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003721- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003722 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003723 Ward's Optik package.
3724
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003725- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3726 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3727 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3728 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3729
3730- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3731 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003732 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003733
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003734- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3735 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3736 shelf are binary pickles.
3737
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003738- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3739 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3740
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003741- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3742 modules are iterators now.
3743
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003744- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3745 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3746 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3747 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3748 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3749 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003750
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003751- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3752 with their entity value.
3753
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003754- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3755
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003756- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3757 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003758
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003759- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3760 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003761 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003762
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003763- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3764 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3765 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3766 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3767 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3768 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3769 main():
3770
3771 import locale
3772 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3773
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003774- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3775 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3776
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003777- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3778 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3779 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3780 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3781 to the new standard.
3782
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003783- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3784 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3785 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3786 an extension to the database.
3787
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003788- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3789 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3790 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3791 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003792 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003793
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003794- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003795 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003796
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003797- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3798 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3799 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3800 bounded integers.
3801
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003802- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3803 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3804 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3805 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3806 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3807 in existence.
3808
3809 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3810 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3811 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3812 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3813 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3814 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3815
3816 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3817 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3818 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3819 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3820
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003821- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3822 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3823 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3824
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003825- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3826
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003827- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3828 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3829 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3830 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3831
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003832- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3833 argument.
3834
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003835- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3836 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3837 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3838 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3839 [SF patch 560794].
3840
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003841- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3842 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3843 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003844 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3845 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3846 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003847
3848- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3849 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003850
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003851- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3852 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3853 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3854 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003855
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003856- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3857 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3858 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3859 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3860 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3861
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003862- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003863
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003864- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3865
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003866- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3867 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3868 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3869 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3870 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3871 identical to None.
3872
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003873- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3874 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3875 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3876 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3877 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3878 results now.
3879
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003880- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3881 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3882
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003883- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3884 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3885 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3886 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3887 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3888 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3889 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3890 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3891
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003892- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3893
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003894- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3895 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3896
3897- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3898 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3899 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3900 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3901 and other systems.
3902
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003903- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3904 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3905 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3906 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 +00003907 work well with these.
3908
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003909- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3910
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003911- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003912 connections.
3913
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003914- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3915 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3916 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3917
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003918- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3919 sets
3920
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003921- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3922 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3923 name.
3924
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003925- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3926 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3927 passed in.
3928
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003929- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003930 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003931 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3932 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003933
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003934- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3935
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003936- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3937
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003938- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3939 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3940 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3941
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003942- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3943 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3944 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3945 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003946 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003947
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003948- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003949 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003950 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003951
3952- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3953 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3954 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3955
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003956- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003957 the value of its expression argument.
3958
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003959- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3960 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3961 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3962
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003963- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3964 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3965 skipstone browser was included.
3966
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003967- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3968 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3969
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003970Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003971-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003972
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003973- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3974 names in addition to accepting file names.
3975
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003976- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3977 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3978 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3979 still used and useful.)
3980
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003981- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3982 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3983 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3984 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003985
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003986- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3987 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3988 the generated binary.
3989
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003990Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003991-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003992
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003993- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3994
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003995- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3996 except in the hands of experts.
3997
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003998- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003999 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4000 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4001 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004002
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004003- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4004 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4005 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4006 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4007 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4008 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4009 builds.
4010
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004011- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4012 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4013 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4014 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4015 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4016 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4017 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4018 new type.
4019
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004020- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004021
4022 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4023 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4024 positive infinities.
4025
4026 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4027 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4028 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4029 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4030 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4031 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4032 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4033
4034 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4035
4036 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4037
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004038- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4039 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4040 size of the executable.
4041
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004042- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4043 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4044 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4045 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004046
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004047- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4048
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004049- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4050 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4051 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004052
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004053- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4054 well as Unix.
4055
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004056- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4057 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4058 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4059 modules in the README file for details.
4060
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004061C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004062-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004063
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004064- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4065 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004066 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004067 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004068 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004069
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004070- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4071 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4072 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4073 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4074 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4075 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004076 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004077 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4078 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4079 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4080 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4081 aligned.)
4082
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004083- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4084 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4085 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4086
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004087- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4088 level.
4089
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004090- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4091 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4092 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4093 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4094 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4095
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004096- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4097 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4098 code.
4099
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004100- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4101 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4102 adjusting for negative indices.
4103
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004104- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4105 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4106 object.
4107
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004108- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4109 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4110 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4111
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004112- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4113 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004114
4115- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4116
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004117- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4118 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4119 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4120 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4121
4122- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4123
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004124- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004125
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004126- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004127 without going through the buffer API.
4128
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004129- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004130
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004131- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4132 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4133 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4134 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4135
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004136- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4137 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4138
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004139- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004140 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4141
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004142New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004143-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004144
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004145- OpenVMS is now supported.
4146
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004147- AtheOS is now supported.
4148
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004149- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4150
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004151- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4152
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004153Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004154-----
4155
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004156- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4157 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4158 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004159
4160Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004162
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004163- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4164 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4165 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4166 bugs.
4167 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004168 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004169 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4170 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004171 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004172
4173- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004174 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004175
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004176- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4177 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4178
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004179- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4180 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004181 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004182 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4183
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004184- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4185 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4186 use files" uninstall option).
4187
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004188- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4189
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004190- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4191 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4192
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004193- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4194 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4195 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4196
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004197- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4198 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4199 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4200 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4201 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004202 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4203 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4204 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004205
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004206- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004207 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004208 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4209 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4210 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4211 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4212 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4213 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4214 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4215 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4216 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4217 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4218 work around.
4219
4220- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4221 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4222 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4223 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4224 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4225 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4226 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4227 specified with O_CREAT too).
4228
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004229Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004230----
4231
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004232- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004233
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004234- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4235 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4236 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4237
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004238- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4239 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4240 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4241
4242- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4243 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4244 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4245 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4246 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4247 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4248 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4249 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004250
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004251- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4252 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4253 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004254
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004255- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4256 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4257 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4258 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4259 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004260
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004261- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4262 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4263 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004264
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004265- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4266 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004267
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004268- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4269 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4270 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4271 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4272 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004273
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004274- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4275 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4276 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4277
4278- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4279 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4280 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004281
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004282- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4283 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4284 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4285 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004286 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004287
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004288- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4289 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004290
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004291- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4292 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004293
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004294- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004295 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004296 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4297 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004298
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004299
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004300What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004301===============================
4302
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004303*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4304
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004305Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004307
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004308- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4309 with a custom metaclass.
4310
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004311Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004312-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004313
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004314- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4315 are proxies.
4316
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004317Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004318-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004319
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004320- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4321 very short strings.
4322
4323- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4324 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4325 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4326 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4327 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4328
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004329Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004330-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004331
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004332- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4333 close or delete time).
4334
4335- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4336 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4337
4338- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4339
4340- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004341 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004342
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004343Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004344-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004345
4346Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004347-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004348
4349C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004350-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004351
4352New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004354
4355Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004356-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004357
4358Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004359-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004360
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004361- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4362
4363- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4364 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4365
4366- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4367 deleted at process exit time.
4368
4369- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4370 in backslash.
4371
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004372Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004373----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004374
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004375- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4376 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4377 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4378
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004379
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004380What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004381===========================
4382
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004383*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4384
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004385Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004386--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004387
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004388- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4389 been extensively updated. See
4390
4391 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4392
4393 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4394
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004395- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4396 deleted!
4397
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004398- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4399 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4400 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4401 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4402 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4403
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004404- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4405
4406 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4407 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4408
4409 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4410 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4411 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4412 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4413 supported anyway.
4414
4415 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4416 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4417
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004418- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4419 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4420 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4421 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4422 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004423
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004424- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4425 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4426 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4427
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004428Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004429-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004430
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004431- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4432 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4433 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4434 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4435 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4436 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004437 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4438 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4439 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4440 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004441
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004442- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4443 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4444 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4445
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004446Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004447-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004448
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004449- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4450
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004451Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004452-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004453
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004454- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4455 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4456 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4457 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4458 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4459 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4460
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004461- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4462
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004463- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4464
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004465- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4466
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004467- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4468 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4469 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4470
4471- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4472
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004473Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004474-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004475
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004476- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4477 off a search on Google.
4478
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004479Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004480-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004481
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004482- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4483 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4484 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4485 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4486 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4487 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4488 other platforms should do likewise.
4489
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004490- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4491 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4492 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4493
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004494C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004495-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004496
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004497- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4498 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4499 producing key-value pairs.
4500
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004501- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004502 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004503 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4504 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4505 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4506 previously went unchallenged.
4507
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004508New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004509-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004510
4511Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004512-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004513
4514Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004515-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004516
4517Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004518----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004519
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004520- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4521 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004522
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004523- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4524 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4525 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4526 home.
4527
4528
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004529What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004530===========================
4531
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004532*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4533
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004534Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004535--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004536
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004537- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4538 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004539
4540 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004541 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004542
4543 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4544 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004545 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004546 This needs to be documented.
4547
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004548- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4549 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4550
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004551- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4552 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4553 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4554
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004555- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4556 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4557
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004558- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4559 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4560 class forbids it).
4561
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004562- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4563 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4564 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4565
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004566- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4567
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004568Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004569-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004570
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004571- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4572 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004573 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004574
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004575- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4576 (like 1 + '').
4577
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004578Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004579-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004580
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004581- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4582 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4583 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4584 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004585 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004586 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4587
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004588- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4589 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4590 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4591 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4592
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004593- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4594 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004595 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4596 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4597 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004598
4599- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4600 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004601
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004602- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4603 bytes on its input.
4604
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004605Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004606-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004607
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004608- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004609 convenience function.
4610
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004611- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4612 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4613 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004614 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4615 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4616 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4617 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4618 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4619 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004620
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004621- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4622 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4623 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4624 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4625
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004626- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4627 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4628 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4629
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004630- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4631 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4632 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4633 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4634
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004635- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4636 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004637 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004638 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4639 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4640 new -l and -e options.
4641
4642- statcache is now deprecated.
4643
4644- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4645 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004646 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004647 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4648 time properly taken into account.
4649
4650- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4651 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4652 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4653 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4654
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004655Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004656-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004657
4658Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004659-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004660
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004661- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4662 is built with libdb3 if available.
4663
4664- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4665
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004666C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004667-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004668
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004669- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4670 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4671 PySequence_Size().
4672
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004673- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4674
4675- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4676 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4677 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4678
4679- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4680 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4681
4682- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4683 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4684
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004685New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004686-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004687
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004688- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4689 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4690
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004691- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4692 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4693
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004694- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4695
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004696Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004697-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004698
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004699- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4700 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4701
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004702Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004703-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004704
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004705Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004706----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004707
4708- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4709 removed completely in the next release.
4710
4711- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4712 OSX.
4713
4714- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4715 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4716
4717- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4718
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004719
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004720What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004721===========================
4722
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4724
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004725Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004726--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004727
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004728- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004729 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004730 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004731 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4732 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004733 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4734 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004735 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4736 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004737
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004738- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4739 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4740
4741- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4742 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4743
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004744Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004745-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004746
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004747- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4748 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4749 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4750 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4751 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4752 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4753 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4754 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4755
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004756- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4757 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4758 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4759 example).
4760
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004761- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004762 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004763 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004764 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004765
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004766- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4767 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4768 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004769 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004770
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004771- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4772 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4773 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4774 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4775 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4776 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4777
4778 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4779
4780 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4781
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004782Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004783-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004784
4785- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4786
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004787- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4788
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004789- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4790 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004791
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004792- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4793 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4794 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4795 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4796 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4797 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004798 attributes.
4799
4800- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4801 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4802 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004803
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004804- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4805 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4806 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004807
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004808- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4809 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4810 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004811 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4812 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4813
4814- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4815 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004816
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004817Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004818-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004819
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004820- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4821 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4822
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004823- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4824 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4825 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4826 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4827
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004828- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4829 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4830 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4831 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4832
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004833 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4834 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4835 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4836 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4837 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4838 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4839 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4840 without losing information).
4841
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004842- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004843 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4844 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4845 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4846 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4847 module).
4848
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004849 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004850 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4851 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4852 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4853 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004854
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004855- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004856 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4857 encoding.
4858
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004859- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4860 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4861
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004862- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004863 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4864
4865- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4866 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4867 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4868 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4869
4870- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4871
4872- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4873 ON, and OFF.
4874
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004875- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4876 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4877
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004878Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004879-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004880
4881- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4882 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4883 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004884
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004885- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4886 been added: -X and -E.
4887
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004888Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004889-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004890
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004891- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4892 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4893
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004894C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004895-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004896
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004897- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4898 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4899 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4900 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4901 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4902
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004903- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4904 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4905 as long) arguments.
4906
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004907- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4908 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4909 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4910 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4911 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4912 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4913
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004914- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4915 input.
4916
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004917New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004918-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004919
4920Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004921-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004922
4923Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004924-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004925
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004926- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4927 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4928 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4929
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004930- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4931 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4932 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004933 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004934
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004935 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4936 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4937 import signal
4938 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004939
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004940 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004941 while 1:
4942 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004943 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004944 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4945 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4946 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4947 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004948
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004949
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004950What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4951===========================
4952
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004953*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4954
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004955Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004956--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004957
4958- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4959 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4960 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4961
4962- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4963 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4964 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4965 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4966 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4967 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4968 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004969
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004970- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004971 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004972 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4973 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4974 associate a docstring with a property.
4975
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004976- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4977 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4978 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4979 other built-in object types.
4980
4981- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4982 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4983 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4984 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4985 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4986
4987- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4988 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4989
4990- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4991 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004992 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004993 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4994 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4995 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4996 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4997 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4998
4999- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5000 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5001 class.
5002
5003- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5004 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5005 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5006 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5007
5008- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5009 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5010 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5011 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5012
5013- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5014 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5015
5016- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5017 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5018 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5019 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5020 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005021 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005022 with the same value as s.
5023
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005024- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5025
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005026Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005027----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005028
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005029- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5030
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005031- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5032 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5033 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5034 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5035 objects.
5036
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005037- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5038 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005039 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5040 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5041
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005042- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5043 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5044 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5045
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005046Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005047-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005048
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005049- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5050 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5051 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5052 by the instances.
5053
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005054- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5055 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5056 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5057
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005058- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5059 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5060 before the entire comparison is complete.
5061
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005062- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5063 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5064 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5065
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005066- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5067 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5068 getwriter().
5069
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005070- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5071 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5072
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005073- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005074 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5075 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5076
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005077- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5078 iterable object.
5079
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005080- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5081 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005082
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005083- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5084 authentication.
5085
5086- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5087 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005088
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005089- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005090 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5091 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5092 a sample driver.)
5093
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005094Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005095-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005096
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005097- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5098 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5099 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5100 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5101 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5102 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5103 kernel has large file support.
5104
5105- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5106 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5107 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5108 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5109 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5110
5111- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5112 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5113 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5114
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005115C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005116-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005117
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005118- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5119 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5120
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005121New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005122-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005123
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005124- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5125 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5126
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005127Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005128-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005129
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005130- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5131 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5132 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5133 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5134 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5135
5136- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5137 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5138 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5139 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5140
5141- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5142 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5143
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005144Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005145-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005146
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005147- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005148 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5149 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005150
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005151
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005152What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5153===========================
5154
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005155*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5156
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005157Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005158----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005159
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005160- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5161 big to represent as a C double.
5162
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005163- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5164 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5165 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5166 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5167 restriction).
5168
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005169- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5170 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5171 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5172 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5173 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5174
5175 >>> dir([])
5176 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5177 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5178 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5179 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5180 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5181 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5182 'reverse', 'sort']
5183
5184 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5185
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005186- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005187 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5188 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5189 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5190 OverflowError exception.
5191
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005192- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005193 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005194 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5195 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5196 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5197 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5198 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005199 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005200 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5201 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5202
5203 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5204 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5205 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5206 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005207
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005208- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005209 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5210 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5211 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5212 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5213 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5214 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5215 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5216 once it is created.
5217
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005218- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5219 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5220 (key, value) pairs.
5221
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005222- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005223 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5224 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5225
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005226- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5227 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5228 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5229 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5230 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005231
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005232- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005233 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5234 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5235
5236 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5237
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005238- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005239 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5240
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005241Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005242-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005243
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005244- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005245 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5246 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005247
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005248- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5249 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5250 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5251 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5252 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5253 in this area anymore).
5254
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005255- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5256 threading.Timer.
5257
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005258- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5259 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5260
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005261- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005262 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5263
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005264- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005265 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5266 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5267 converted to Python longs.
5268
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005269- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005270 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5271
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005272- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5273 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5274 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5275
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005276Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005277-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005278
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005279- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5280 division operators as per PEP 238.
5281
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005282Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005283-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005284
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005285- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5286 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5287 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5288 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5289
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005290C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005291-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005292
5293- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005294
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005295- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5296 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005297 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005298
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005299 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5300 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005301 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005302 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005303
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005304- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005305 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5306 module:
5307
5308 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005309
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005310 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5311 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005312
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005313 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5314 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005315
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005316 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5317
5318 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5319
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005320- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005321 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5322 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5323 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005324
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005325New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005326-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005327
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005328- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5329 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5330 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5331 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5332 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005333
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005334Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005335-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005336
5337Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005338-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005339
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005340- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5341 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5342 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5343 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005344 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5345 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5346 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5347 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5348 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005349
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005350- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005351 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5352
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005353
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005354What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5355===========================
5356
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005357*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5358
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005359Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005360-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005361
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005362- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5363 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5364
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005365- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5366 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5367 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005368
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005369- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5370 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5371 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5372 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005373
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005374- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5375
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005376- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005377
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005378Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005379-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005380
5381- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005382 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005383 the module docstring for details.
5384
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005385Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005386-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005387
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005388- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005389 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5390 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5391 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005392
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005393- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5394 Nick Mathewson.
5395
5396Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005397----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005398
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005399- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5400 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5401 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5402 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5403 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5404 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5405 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5406 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5407
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005408- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5409 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5410 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5411 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5412
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005413- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5414 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5415 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5416 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5417 come a long way).
5418
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005419- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5420 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5421 write filters for these warnings).
5422
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005423- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5424 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5425 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5426 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5427 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5428
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005429- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5430 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5431 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5432 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5433 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5434 older distribution.
5435
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005436Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005437-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005438
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005439- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5440 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005441 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005442
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005443- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5444 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5445 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5446
5447- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5448
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005449- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5450
5451- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5452
5453- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5454
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005455- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005456
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005457- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5458
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005459New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005460-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005461
5462C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005463-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005464
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005465- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5466 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5467 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5468 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5469 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5470 against buffer overruns.
5471
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005472- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005473 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5474 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005475 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5476 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5477 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5478
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005479- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5480 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5481 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5482 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5483 deprecated.
5484
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005485Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005486-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005487
5488- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5489 relevant is found.
5490
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005491
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005492What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005493===========================
5494
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005495*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5496
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005497Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005498----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005499
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005500- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5501 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5502 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5503 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5504 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5505 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5506 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5507 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005508 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005509 repaired.
5510
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005511- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005512 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005513 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5514 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5515 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5516 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5517 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5518 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5519 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5520 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5521
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005522- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5523 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5524 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5525 leading BMO character).
5526
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005527- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5528 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5529 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5530
5531 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5532 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5533 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005534
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005535 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5536 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5537 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5538 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5539 for various simple to use conversions.
5540
5541 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5542 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5543
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005544 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5545 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5546 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5547 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5548 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5549 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5550 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5551 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5552 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5553 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5554 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5555 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5556 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5557 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5558 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005559
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005560- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5561 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5562 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005563 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005564 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005565
5566 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005567 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5568 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5569 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5570 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5571 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005572 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5573 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005574
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005575 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5576 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5577 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005578 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005579
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005580- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5581 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5582 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5583 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5584 floating arithmetic,
5585
5586 x = 9007199254740992.0
5587 print long(x)
5588
5589 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5590 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5591 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5592 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5593 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5594 functions are of good quality).
5595
5596 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5597 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5598 algorithms to break.
5599
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005600- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5601 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5602 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5603 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5604 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5605 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5606 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5607 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5608 order.
5609
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005610- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5611 operation along the most common code paths.
5612
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005613- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5614 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5615
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005616- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5617 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5618 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5619 {}.update(UserDict())
5620
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005621- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5622 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5623 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5624 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5625 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5626 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5627 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5628 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5629
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005630- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005631 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005632
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005633 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005634 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5635 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005636 join() method of strings
5637 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005638 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5639 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005640 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005641 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005642
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005643- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5644 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5645
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005646- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5647 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5648
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005649- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5650 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5651 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5652 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5653
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005654- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5655 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005656 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005657 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5658 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005659
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005660- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5661
5662
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005663Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005664-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005665
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005666- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005667 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005668 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5669 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5670
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005671- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5672 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5673
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005674- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5675 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5676 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5677 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5678
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005679- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5680 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5681 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5682
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005683- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5684
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005685- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5686
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005687- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5688 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5689 that are still imported into string.py).
5690
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005691- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5692
5693- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5694 Now it does.
5695
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005696- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5697
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005698- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5699 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5700 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5701 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5702 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005703 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5704 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005705
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005706- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5707 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5708 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5709 'help(object)'.
5710
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005711Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005712-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005713
5714- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005715 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005716 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5717 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5718
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005719- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005720 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5721 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005722
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005723C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005724-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005725
5726- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5727 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005728
5729----
5730
5731**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**