blob: a95774fcec91040c91c3244b5aa656eb6a770c98 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000015- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
16 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
17 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
18
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000019- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
20 configure would break checking curses.h.
21
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000022- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
23 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
24
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000025- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
26
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000027- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
28
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000029- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
30
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000031- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
32 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
33
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000034- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
35 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
36 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
37
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000038- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
39 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000040 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000041
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000042- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
43 now encodes backslash correctly.
44
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000045- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
46
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000047- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
48 and long longs.
49
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000050- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
51 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
52 message in this case.
53
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000054- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
55 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
56 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
57 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
58 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
59
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000060- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000061
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000062- Speed up some Unicode operations.
63
64- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
65
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000066- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000067 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
68
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000069- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
70
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000071- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
72 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
73
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000074- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
75
76- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
77
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000078- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
79 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
80 was empty.
81
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000082- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
83 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
84
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000085- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000086 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000087
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000088- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
89 codes.
90
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000091- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
92 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
93 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
94
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000095- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
96 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
97
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000098- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000099 (fixes bug #1119418).
100
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000101- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
102
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000103- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
104 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
105
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000106- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
107 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
108 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
109
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000110- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
111
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000112- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
113 reference counts in some error exit cases.
114
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000115- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
116 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
117 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
118 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
119 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
120 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
121 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
122 realloc.
123
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000124- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
125 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
126
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000127- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
128 like their int counterparts.
129
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000130- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
131 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
132 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
133 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
134 for a longer write-up of the problem).
135
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000136- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
137 serializing floats.
138
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000139- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
140 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
141 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
142
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000143- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
144 278.
145
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000146- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
147 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
148 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
149 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000150 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000151 PyNumber_*().
152 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
153
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000154- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
155 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
156 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
157 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
158
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000159- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
160 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
161 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
162 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
163 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
164
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000165- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
166 disabled caused a crash.
167
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000168- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
169 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
170
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000171- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000172 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
173
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000174- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
175
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000176- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000177 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
178 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
179 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000180
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000181- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
182
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000183- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
184 returning None.
185
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000186- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000187 ('\') with a specific error message.
188
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000189- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
190
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000191- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
192 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
193
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000194- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000195 an ferror() call.
196
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000197- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
198 list.sort().
199
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000200- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
201 (2+3) --> (5).
202
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000203- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
204
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000205- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
206 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000207
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000208- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
209 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
210 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
211
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000212- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
213 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
214 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
215
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000216Extension Modules
217-----------------
218
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000219- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
220
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000221- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
222 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
223 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
224
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000225- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
226 without prior setting of the userptr.
227
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000228- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
229
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000230- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
231
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000232- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
233 problem on AIX.
234
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000235- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
236
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000237- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
238
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000239- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
240
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000241- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
242 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
243
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000244- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
245
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000246- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
247 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
248
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000249- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
250
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000251- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
252 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
253
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000254- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
255 returns in cStringIO.c.
256
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000257- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
258 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
259
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000260- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
261
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000262- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
263
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000264- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
265 the file system encoding.
266
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000267- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
268 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000269
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000270- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
271
272- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000273 line without newlines.
274
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000275- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
276 on Windows.
277
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000278- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000279 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
280
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000281- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
282 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
283 for large or negative values.
284
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000285- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000286 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000287
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000288- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
289
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000290- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
291 if available on the platform.
292
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000293- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
294 available on the platform.
295
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000296- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
297 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
298
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000299- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
300
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000301- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
302 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
303 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
304
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000305- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
306
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000307- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
308 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
309
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000310- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000311 file size.
312
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000313- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
314
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000315- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
316 {remove_history,replace_history}
317
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000318- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
319 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000320
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000321- stat_float_times is now True.
322
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000323- array.array objects are now picklable.
324
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000325- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
326 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
327
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000328- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
329 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
330 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
331
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000332- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
333 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000334
335Library
336-------
337
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000338- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
339 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
340
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000341- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
342
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000343- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
344
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000345- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
346 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
347 LoadError subclasses IOError.
348
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000349- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000350 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
351 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
352 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
353 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
354
355 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
356 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
357 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
358 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
359 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000360
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000361- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
362 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
363 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
364
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000365- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
366
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000367- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
368
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000369- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
370 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
371 illegal argument)
372
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000373- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
374 is an error in the format string.
375
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000376- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
377
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000378- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000379 "parent" argument.
380
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000381- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
382 for padding.
383
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000384- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
385 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
386
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000387- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
388 to get the correct encoding.
389
390- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
391 languages.
392
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000393- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
394
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000395- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
396
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000397- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
398
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000399- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
400 functionality.
401
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000402- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
403
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000404- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
405 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
406
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000407- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
408 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
409 match the Content-Length header.
410
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000411- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
412
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000413- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
414 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000415 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000416
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000417- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
418
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000419- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
420
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000421- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
422 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
423
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000424- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
425 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
426 Tkdnd.
427
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000428- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
429 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
430
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000431- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
432 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
433
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000434- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000435 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
436
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000437- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
438 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
439
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000440- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
441 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
442
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000443- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000444 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000445
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000446- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
447
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000448- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
449 error messages.
450
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000451- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
452
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000453- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
454 Bug #1224621.
455
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000456- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
457 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
458 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
459 terminates by raising StopIteration.
460
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000461- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
462
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000463- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
464 component of the path.
465
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000466- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
467 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
468 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
469 class at all.
470
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000471- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
472 files to PyPI.
473
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000474- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
475 them to PyPI.
476
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000477- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
478 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
479 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
480 work as expected.
481
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000482- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
483 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
484
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000485- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000486 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
487
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000488- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
489
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000490- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
491 to build.
492
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000493- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
494 symbolic links on Windows.
495
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000496- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000497 profile.py if available.
498
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000499- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
500
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000501- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
502 in LWPCookieJar.
503
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000504- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
505
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000506- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
507
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000508- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
509
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000510- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
511
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000512- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
513
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000514- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
515
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000516- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
517
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000518- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
519
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000520- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
521 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
522 be exploited in various ways.
523
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000524- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000525 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
526
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000527- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
528 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
529
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000530- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000531 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
532
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000533- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
534
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000535- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
536
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000537- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
538
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000539- Enhancements to the csv module:
540
541 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000542 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000543 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000544 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
545 reporting.
546 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
547 dictates.
548 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000549 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000550 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000551 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
552 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000553 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
554 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000555 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000556 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
557 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
558 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
559 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
560 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
561 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
562 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
563 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
564 without first creating a dialect class.
565 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
566 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
567 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000568 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000569 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
570 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000571 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
572 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
573 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
574 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000575 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
576 This has been fixed.
577
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000578- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
579 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
580 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
581 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
582
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000583- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
584
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000585- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
586 (Bug #951915).
587
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000588- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
589 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
590 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000591 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000592
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000593- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
594
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000595- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
596 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
597
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000598- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
599
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000600- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
601
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000602- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
603
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000604- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
605
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000606- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
607
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000608- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
609 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
610 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
611
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000612- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000613 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000614
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000615- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
616 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
617 tokenizer with very long source lines.
618
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000619- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
620 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
621 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000622
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000623- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
624 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000625
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000626- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
627 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
628
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000629- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
630 correctly.
631
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000632- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
633 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
634 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
635 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
636 between two lines.
637
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000638- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
639 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
640 handlers.
641
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000642- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000643 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
644 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000645
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000646- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
647 considering it exactly like a '*'.
648
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000649- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
650 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000651
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000652- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
653
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000654Build
655-----
656
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000657- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
658
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000659- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
660 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
661
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000662- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
663
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000664- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
665 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
666
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000667- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
668 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
669
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000670- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
671 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
672 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000673 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000674
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000675- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
676 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
677 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
678
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000679- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
680
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000681- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
682 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
683
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000684- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
685 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
686 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
687 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
688 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
689 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
690 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
691 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
692
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000693- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
694 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
695 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
696 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
697
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000698C API
699-----
700
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000701- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
702
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000703- Removed PyRange_New().
704
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000705- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
706 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
707 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
708 mappings.
709
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000710
711Tests
712-----
713
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000714- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000715
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000716- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
717 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
718
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000719
720Documentation
721-------------
722
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000723- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
724
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000725- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
726
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000727- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
728
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000729- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
730
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000731- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
732
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000733- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
734
735- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
736
737- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
738
739- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
740
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000741- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
742 Closes bug #1166582.
743
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000744- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
745 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
746 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
747
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000748Mac
749---
750
751
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000752New platforms
753-------------
754
755- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
756
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000757
758Tools/Demos
759-----------
760
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000761- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
762 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
763 source files that need an encoding declaration.
764 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
765
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000766- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
767
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000768- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000769
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000770- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
771 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000772
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000773What's New in Python 2.4 final?
774===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000775
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000776*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000777
778Core and builtins
779-----------------
780
781- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
782 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
783 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
784
785
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000786What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
787==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000788
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000789*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000790
791Core and builtins
792-----------------
793
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000794- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
795 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
796 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
797
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000798
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000799Library
800-------
801
802- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
803 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
804 raised is re-raised.
805
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000806- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
807 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
808
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000809- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
810 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
811 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
812 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
813 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
814 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
815 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
816 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
817 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
818 by the slice are recomputed now.
819
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000820- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000821
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000822Build
823-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000824
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000825- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
826 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
827 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000828
829C API
830-----
831
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000832- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
833
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000834
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000835What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
836================================
837
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000838*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000839
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000840License
841-------
842
843The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
844is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
845changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
846Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
847intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
848durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
849the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
850License::
851
852 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
853
854says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
855to Python 2.1.1.
856
857The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
858License Version 2.
859
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000860Core and builtins
861-----------------
862
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000863- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
864 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
865 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
866 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
867 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
868 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
869 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000870 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000871 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
872 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
873
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000874- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000875
876Extension Modules
877-----------------
878
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000879- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
880 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
881 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
882 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000883
884Library
885-------
886
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000887- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
888 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
889 returned.
890
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000891- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
892
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000893- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
894 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
895
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000896- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
897
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000898- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
899 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000900
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000901- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
902
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000903- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
904
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000905- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000906 the source code is updated and reloaded.
907
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000908Build
909-----
910
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000911- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000912
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000913What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
914================================
915
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000916*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000917
918Core and builtins
919-----------------
920
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000921- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000922 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
923
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000924- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
925 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
926 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
927 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
928
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000929- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
930 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
931
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000932- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
933 constant.
934
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000935- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
936 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
937 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
938 large), and to anomalies such as
939 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
940 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
941 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
942 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000943
944Extension modules
945-----------------
946
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000947- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
948 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000949 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
950 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
951 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000952
953Library
954-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000955
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000956- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000957 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000958 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
959 --swig-cpp.
960
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000961- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
962 it is set.
963
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000964- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000965
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000966- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
967 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
968 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
969 Closes bug #1039270.
970
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000971- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000972
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000973 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000974 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
975 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
976 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
977 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
978 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
979 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
980 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
981 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
982 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
983 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
984 + Updates to documentation.
985
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000986- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
987 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
988 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
989 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
990
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000991- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000992
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000993- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
994 applications should use the getmember function.
995
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000996- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
997
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000998- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
999 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1000 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1001 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1002 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1003 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1004 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1005 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1006 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1007
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001008- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1009 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001010 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001011
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001012- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1013 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1014 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1015 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1016 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1017 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1018 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1019 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001020
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001021- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1022 the new public features (of which there are many).
1023
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001024- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001025 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1026 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1027 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1028 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001029 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001030
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001031- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1032
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001033- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1034 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1035 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1036 options.
1037
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001038- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1039 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1040 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1041 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1042 conditions under which non-string values work.
1043
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001044Build
1045-----
1046
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001047- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1048 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1049 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1050
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001051- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1052 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1053 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1054 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1055 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001056
1057C API
1058-----
1059
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001060- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1061 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1062
1063- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1064
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001065- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1066 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1067 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1068 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1069 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1070 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1071 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1072 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1073 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1074
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001075- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1076
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001077- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1078 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1079 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001080
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001081Tests
1082-----
1083
1084- test__locale ported to unittest
1085
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001086Mac
1087---
1088
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001089- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1090 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1091 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001092
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001093Tools/Demos
1094-----------
1095
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001096- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1097 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1098 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1099 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1100 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001101
1102
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001103What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1104=================================
1105
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001106*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001107
1108Core and builtins
1109-----------------
1110
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001111- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001112 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1113
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001114- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1115 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1116 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1117 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1118 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1119 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1120 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1121 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001122 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1123 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1124 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1125 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1126 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001127
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001128- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1129 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1130 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1131 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1132 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1133
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001134- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1135
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001136- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1137 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1138
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001139- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1140 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1141 modified the list.
1142
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001143- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1144 functions is now writable.
1145
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001146- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1147 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1148 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1149 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1150
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001151- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1152 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1153 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1154 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1155 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001156
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001157- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1158 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1159
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001160Extension modules
1161-----------------
1162
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001163- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1164
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001165- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1166 data.
1167
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001168- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1169 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1170 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1171 supposed to have been truncated away.
1172
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001173- Added socket.socketpair().
1174
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001175- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1176 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1177
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001178- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001179 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1180
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001181Library
1182-------
1183
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001184- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001185 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001186
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001187- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1188 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1189
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001190- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1191 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1192
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001193- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1194
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001195- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1196 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001197
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001198- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1199 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1200
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001201- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1202
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001203- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1204
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001205- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1206
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001207- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1208 Percivall.
1209
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001210- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1211 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1212
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001213- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1214 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1215 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001216 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001217
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001218- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1219 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1220 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1221 and exponent.
1222
1223- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1224
1225- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001226 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001227 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1228
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001229- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1230 to the readline module.
1231
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001232- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001233 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1234 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001235
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001236- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1237 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1238 contains symlinks.
1239
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001240- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1241 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1242
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001243- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1244 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1245 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1246
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001247- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1248 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1249 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1250 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1251 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1252 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1253 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1254 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1255 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1256 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1257 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1258 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1259 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1260
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001261- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1262
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001263Tools/Demos
1264-----------
1265
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001266- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1267 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1268
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001269- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1270
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001271Build
1272-----
1273
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001274- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1275 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1276 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1277 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1278 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1279 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1280 plans to do so.
1281
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001282- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1283 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1284
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001285- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1286 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1287
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001288- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1289 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1290
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001291- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1292 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1293
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001294- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1295 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1296
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001297C API
1298-----
1299
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001300..
1301
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001302Documentation
1303-------------
1304
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001305- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1306 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1307
1308- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1309 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1310 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001311
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001312New platforms
1313-------------
1314
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001315- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1316
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001317Tests
1318-----
1319
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001320..
1321
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001322Windows
1323-------
1324
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001325- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1326 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1327 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1328 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1329 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1330 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1331 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1332 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1333 the problem.
1334
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001335Mac
1336---
1337
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001338..
1339
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001340
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001341What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1342=================================
1343
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001344*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001345
1346Core and builtins
1347-----------------
1348
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001349- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1350 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1351 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1352 sensitive code.
1353
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001354- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001355 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001356
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001357 @staticmethod
1358 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001359
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001360 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001361
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001362- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1363 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1364 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1365 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1366 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1367 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1368 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1369 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1370 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1371 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1372 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1373
1374 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1375 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1376 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1377 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1378 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1379 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1380 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1381
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001382- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1383 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1384
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001385- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001386 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001387
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001388- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001389 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001390 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1391
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001392- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001393 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1394 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1395
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001396- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1397 types that support garbage collection.
1398
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001399- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1400
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001401- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1402 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1403 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1404 Jython.
1405
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001406- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1407
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001408- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1409 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1410
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001411- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1412 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1413 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001414
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001415- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1416 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1417 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1418
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001419Extension modules
1420-----------------
1421
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001422- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1423
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001424Library
1425-------
1426
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001427- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1428 TIS-620
1429
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001430- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1431 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1432 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1433 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1434 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1435 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1436 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1437 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1438 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1439 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1440
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001441- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1442
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001443- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1444 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1445 same as when the argument is omitted).
1446 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1447
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001448- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1449
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001450- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1451 schemes are offered.
1452
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001453- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1454
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001455- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1456 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1457 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1458
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001459- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1460
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001461- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1462 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1463
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001464- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1465 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1466 when dummy_threading is being used.
1467
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001468- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1469 from a tarfile.
1470
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001471- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001472 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001473
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001474- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1475 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1476 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1477 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1478
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001479- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1480 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1481
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001482- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1483 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1484 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1485 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1486 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1487 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1488 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1489 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1490 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1491 by some other method in progress).
1492
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001493- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1494 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1495 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001496
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001497- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1498
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001499- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1500 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1501 AM Kuchling.
1502
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001503- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1504 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1505 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1506
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001507- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1508 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1509 instead of unsigned.
1510
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001511- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001512 no longer part of the public API.
1513
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001514- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1515 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1516 string methods of the same name).
1517
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001518- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001519 SF patch 945642.
1520
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001521- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1522
1523 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1524
1525 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1526 DocTestSuites.
1527
1528- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1529 that provide thread-local data.
1530
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001531- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1532 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1533
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001534- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1535
1536- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1537 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1538 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1539
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001540- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1541
1542 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1543 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1544 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001545
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001546 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1547 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1548 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1549 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1550
1551 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1552 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1553
1554 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1555 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1556 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1557 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1558
1559 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1560 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1561 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1562 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1563 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1564
1565 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1566 wrapping help output.
1567
1568 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1569 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1570 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001571
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001572C API
1573-----
1574
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001575- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1576 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1577 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1578 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1579 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1580 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1581 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1582 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1583 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1584 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1585 its visible semantics have not changed.
1586
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001587- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1588 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1589
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001590Documentation
1591-------------
1592
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001593- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001594
1595 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001596 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001597
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001598 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001599
1600 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1601
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001602- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001603
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001604Tests
1605-----
1606
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001607- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001608 platforms that use the Makefile.
1609
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001610- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1611 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1612 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1613
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001614
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001615What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1616=================================
1617
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001618*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001619
1620Core and builtins
1621-----------------
1622
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001623- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1624 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1625 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1626 objects now (one object instead of three).
1627
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001628- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1629 Windows DLLs.
1630
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001631- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1632 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001633
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001634- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1635 a new .pyc magic.
1636
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001637- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1638 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1639 be there.
1640
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001641- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1642 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1643 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1644
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001645- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1646 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1647 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1648
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001649- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1650
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001651- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1652 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1653 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001654
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001655- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1656 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1657
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001658- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1659
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001660- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001661 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001662
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001663- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1664
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001665- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1666
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001667- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1668 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1669
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001670- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1671 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1672 Fixes bug #858016 .
1673
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001674- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1675 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1676 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1677
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001678- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1679 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1680 improves their performance (about 35%).
1681
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001682- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1683 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1684 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1685
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001686- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1687 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1688 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1689 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1690
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001691- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1692 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001693 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001694 length is not known).
1695
1696- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1697 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001698 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1699 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001700 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1701
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001702- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1703 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1704
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001705- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1706 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1707 keyword arguments.
1708
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001709- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1710 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1711 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1712
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001713- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1714 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1715 cases.
1716
1717- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1718 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1719 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1720 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1721 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1722 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1723 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1724 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1725 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1726 a release build.
1727
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001728- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1729 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1730
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001731- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001732 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001733
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001734- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1735 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1736 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1737 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1738 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1739 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1740 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1741 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1742 destroyed.
1743
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001744- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1745 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1746 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1747 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1748 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1749 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1750 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1751 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1752
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001753- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1754 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1755 character other than a space.
1756
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001757- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1758 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1759 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1760 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1761 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1762 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1763 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1764 attributes with the same name.
1765
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001766- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1767 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1768 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1769 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1770 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1771 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1772 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1773 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1774 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1775 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1776 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1777 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1778 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1779 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001780
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001781- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1782 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1783 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1784 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1785 This has been repaired.
1786
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001787- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1788
1789- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1790
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001791- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1792 over a sequence.
1793
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001794- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001795 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001796
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001797- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1798
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001799- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1800 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1801 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1802 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1803 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1804 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1805 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1806 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1807
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001808- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1809 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1810 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1811
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001812- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1813 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1814 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1815 freelist.
1816
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001817- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1818 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1819
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001820- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1821 number.
1822
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001823- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1824 a TypeError exception.
1825
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001826- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1827 820195.
1828
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001829- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1830 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1831 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1832
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001833- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001834 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1835 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001836
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001837- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1838 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1839 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1840
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001841- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1842 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001843 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001844
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001845- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001846 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1847 the first call.
1848
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001849
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001850Extension modules
1851-----------------
1852
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001853- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1854 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1855
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001856- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1857 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1858 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1859 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1860 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1861 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1862 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001863
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001864- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1865
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001866- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1867
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001868- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1869 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1870
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001871- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1872 fewer false positives.
1873
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001874- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1875 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1876
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001877- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001878 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1879
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001880- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001881 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001882 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001883 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1884 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001885
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001886- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1887 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1888 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1889 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1890
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001891- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1892 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1893 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1894 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1895 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1896 #897625.
1897
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001898- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1899 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1900
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001901- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1902 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1903 and pops on either side of the deque.
1904
1905- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1906 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1907
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001908- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1909 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1910 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1911 other functions that expect a function argument.
1912
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001913- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1914
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001915- os.getsid was added.
1916
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001917- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1918 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1919 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1920
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001921- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1922
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001923- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1924
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001925- readline.clear_history was added.
1926
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001927- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1928
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001929- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1930
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001931- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1932
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001933- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1934
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001935- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1936
1937- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1938
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001939- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1940
1941- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1942
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001943- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1944 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1945 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1946
1947- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1948 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1949 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1950 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1951 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1952 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1953 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1954
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001955- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1956 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1957 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1958 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001959
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001960- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001961 iterators from a single iterable.
1962
1963- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1964 of raising a TypeError exception.
1965
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001966- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1967 as parameter.
1968
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001969Library
1970-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001971
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001972- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1973
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001974- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1975 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1976 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001977
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001978- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1979 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1980 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001981
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001982- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001983
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001984- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1985 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001986
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001987- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1988 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1989
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001990- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1991
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001992- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001993 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001994
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001995- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001996 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001997
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001998- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1999
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002000- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2001 on cygwin and mingw32.
2002
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002003- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2004
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002005- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2006 module.
2007
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002008- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2009 installation scheme for all platforms.
2010
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002011- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002012 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002013
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002014- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2015 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2016 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2017
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002018- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2019 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2020 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2021
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002022- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2023
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002024- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2025
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002026- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2027 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2028
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002029- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2030 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2031 type pattern with the same value exists.
2032
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002033- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2034 when run from the command prompt).
2035
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002036- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2037 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2038
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002039- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2040 default sort).
2041
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002042- Added global runctx function to profile module
2043
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002044- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2045
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002046- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2047
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002048- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2049
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002050- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002051 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2052 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2053 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2054 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2055 accordingly.
2056
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002057- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2058 decoding standards.
2059
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002060- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2061 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2062 called for all requests.
2063
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002064- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2065 they are passed to the compiler.
2066
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002067- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2068 indent, width and depth.
2069
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002070- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2071 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2072
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002073- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2074 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2075
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002076- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2077
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002078- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2079
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002080- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2081
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002082- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2083 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2084
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002085- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002086 for better performance.
2087
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002088- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002089
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002090- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2091 a string).
2092
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002093- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2094
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002095- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2096
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002097- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2098
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002099- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2100
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002101- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2102 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2103 list of fieldnames.
2104
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002105- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2106 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2107
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002108- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2109
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002110- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2111 empty lists.
2112
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002113- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2114 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2115 and shelves.
2116
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002117- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2118 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2119
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002120- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002121 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2122 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002123
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002124- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2125 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002126 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002127
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002128- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002129 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2130 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2131
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002132- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2133 and removed in Py2.4.
2134
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002135- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2136
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002137- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2138
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002139Tools/Demos
2140-----------
2141
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002142- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2143 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2144
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002145- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2146
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002147- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2148 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2149 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2150 destination in situations where both files are given.
2151
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002152- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2153 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2154 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2155 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2156
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002157- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2158
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002159- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2160 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2161 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2162 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2163 now.
2164
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002165- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2166 in effect
2167
2168- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2169 C-c C-h
2170
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002171- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2172 -d option was given.
2173
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002174Build
2175-----
2176
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002177- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2178 build under OS X.
2179
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002180- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2181 --enable-profiling.
2182
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002183- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2184 is configured --with-tsc.
2185
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002186- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2187 on AMD64.
2188
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002189- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2190 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2191
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002192- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2193 removed.
2194
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002195- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2196 supported (see PEP 11).
2197
2198- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2199
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002200- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2201
2202- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2203 (see PEP 11).
2204
2205- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2206 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2207
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002208C API
2209-----
2210
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002211- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2212 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2213 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2214
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002215- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2216 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2217 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2218 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2219
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002220- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2221 generator objects.
2222
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002223- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2224 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002225 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2226 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002227
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002228- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2229 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2230
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002231- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2232 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2233 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2234 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2235 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2236
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002237- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2238 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2239 about 10% faster.
2240
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002241- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2242 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2243
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002244- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2245 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2246 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2247 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2248
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002249Windows
2250-------
2251
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002252- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2253 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2254 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2255 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2256
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002257- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2258 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2259 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2260
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002261
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002262What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2263===============================
2264
2265*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2266
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002267IDLE
2268----
2269
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002270- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2271 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2272 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2273 context-menu actions.
2274
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002275- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2276 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2277 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2278 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2279 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2280 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2281 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2282 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2283 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2284
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002285
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002286What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2287=============================================
2288
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002289*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002290
2291Core and builtins
2292-----------------
2293
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002294- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002295 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002296 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2297
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002298Extension modules
2299-----------------
2300
2301- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2302 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2303 than once. This has been fixed.
2304
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002305- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2306 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2307 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2308 call.
2309
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002310- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2311
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002312Library
2313-------
2314
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002315- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2316 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2317
2318- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2319 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2320 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2321 restored.
2322
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002323IDLE
2324----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002325
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002326- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002327
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002328Build
2329-----
2330
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002331- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2332 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2333
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002334C API
2335-----
2336
2337Windows
2338-------
2339
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002340- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2341 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2342
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002343- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2344
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002345Mac
2346---
2347
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002348- Various fixes to pimp.
2349
2350- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2351
2352- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2353 more problems than it solves.
2354
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002355
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002356What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2357=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002358
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002359*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2360
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002361Core and builtins
2362-----------------
2363
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002364- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2365 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2366
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002367- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2368 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002369 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002370
2371- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2372 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2373 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002374 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002375
2376- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2377 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002378
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002379- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2380 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2381 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2382
2383- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002384 770247.
2385
2386- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002387
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002388Extension modules
2389-----------------
2390
2391- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2392 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2393
2394- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2395
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002396- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2397
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002398- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2399 contained within the _strptime module.
2400
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002401- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2402 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2403
2404- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002405 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2406
2407- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2408 the find_class attribute, if present.
2409
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002410- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002411
2412 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2413 (SF bug 763298).
2414
2415 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002416 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2417 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2418 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002419
2420 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2421
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002422Library
2423-------
2424
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002425- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2426
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002427- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2428 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2429 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2430 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2431 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2432 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2433 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2434 or Tester().
2435
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002436- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2437 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2438 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2439 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2440 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2441 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2442 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2443 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2444 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002445
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002446 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002447
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002448- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2449 weren't before was an oversight.
2450
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002451- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2452 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2453
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002454- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2455 when there are no lines.
2456
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002457- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2458 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2459
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002460- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2461 to child processes.
2462
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002463- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2464
2465- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2466
2467- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2468 xmlrpclib.
2469
2470- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2471 responses.
2472
2473- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2474 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2475
2476- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2477 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2478 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2479
2480- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2481 used as patterns.
2482
2483- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2484 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2485 than Tk 8.3.
2486
2487- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2488
2489- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002490
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002491Tools/Demos
2492-----------
2493
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002494- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2495
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002496- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2497
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002498- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002499
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002500Build
2501-----
2502
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002503- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2504
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002505- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2506
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002507- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2508 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002509
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002510- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2511 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2512 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002513
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002514C API
2515-----
2516
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002517- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2518 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2519
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002520Windows
2521-------
2522
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002523- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2524 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2525 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2526 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2527 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2528 Python exception ::
2529
2530 thread.error: can't start new thread
2531
2532 is raised now.
2533
2534- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2535 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2536 instead of from DLL teardown.
2537
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002538Mac
2539---
2540
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002541- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002542 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002543 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2544 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2545 the executable in the bundle.
2546
2547- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002548
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002549- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2550
2551- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2552 on Panther.
2553
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002554What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2555================================
2556
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002557*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002558
2559Core and builtins
2560-----------------
2561
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002562- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2563 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2564 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2565 with the -i option.
2566
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002567- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2568 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2569
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002570- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2571 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2572
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002573- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2574 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2575 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2576 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2577 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2578 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2579 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2580 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2581 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2582 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2583 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2584 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2585 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002586
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002587- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2588 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2589 embedded in a lambda expression.
2590
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002591- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2592 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2593 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2594 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2595 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2596
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002597- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2598 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2599 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2600
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002601- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2602 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2603
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002604- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2605 It's writable again.
2606
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002607- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2608 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2609 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002610 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002611
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002612- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2613 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2614 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2615
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002616Extension modules
2617-----------------
2618
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002619- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2620 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2621
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002622- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2623 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2624 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2625 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2626
2627- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2628 collection.
2629
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002630- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2631 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2632 unique within a single program run.
2633
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002634- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2635 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2636
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002637- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2638 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2639
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002640- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2641 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002642
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002643- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2644
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002645- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2646 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2647
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002648- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2649 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2650 for many BSD-derived systems.
2651
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002652
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002653Library
2654-------
2655
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002656- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2657 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2658 primary ones:
2659
2660 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2661 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2662 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2663
2664 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2665 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2666 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2667 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2668 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2669 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2670
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002671- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2672 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2673 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2674 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2675 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2676 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2677 argument.
2678
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002679- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2680 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2681 in the archive.
2682
2683- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2684 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2685
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002686- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2687 569574).
2688
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002689- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2690 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2691 no more.
2692
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002693- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2694 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2695 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2696 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2697 code coverage.
2698
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002699- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2700 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2701 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002702 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2703 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002704
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002705- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2706 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2707 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002708 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002709
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002710- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2711
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002712- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2713 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2714 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2715 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2716
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002717- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2718 handling.
2719
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002720- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2721 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2722
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002723- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2724 in socket.py.
2725
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002726- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2727
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002728- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2729 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2730 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2731 opener with proxy support.
2732
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002733- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2734
2735- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2736
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002737Tools/Demos
2738-----------
2739
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002740- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2741
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002742- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2743
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002744- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2745 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002746
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002747- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2748 files.
2749
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002750Build
2751-----
2752
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002753- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002754 different root directory.
2755
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002756C API
2757-----
2758
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002759- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2760 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2761 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2762 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2763 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2764 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2765 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2766 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2767 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2768 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2769
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002770- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2771 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2772 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2773 from Python.
2774
2775
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002776New platforms
2777-------------
2778
2779None this time.
2780
2781Tests
2782-----
2783
2784- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2785 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2786
2787Windows
2788-------
2789
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002790- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2791
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002792- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2793 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2794 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2795 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2796 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2797 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2798 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2799 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2800 that's what it's for.
2801
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002802Mac
2803---
2804
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002805- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2806 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2807 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2808 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002809- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2810 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2811- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002812
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002813SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2814------------------------------------
2815
2816430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2817598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2818622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2819661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2820683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2821697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2822713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2823724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2824727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2825729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2826730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2827731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2828732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2829733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2830735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2831740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2832744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2833745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2834747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2835749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2836751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2837753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2838755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2839757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2840760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2841
2842
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002843What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2844================================
2845
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002846*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002847
2848Core and builtins
2849-----------------
2850
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002851- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2852 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2853
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002854- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2855 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2856 and cannot be strings).
2857
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002858- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2859 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2860 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2861 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2862
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002863- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2864 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2865 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2866 Python itself.
2867
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002868- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2869 the referenced object, if it has one.
2870
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002871- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2872 the thread started at
2873 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2874
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002875- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2876 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2877 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2878 placed on a list index.
2879
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002880- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2881 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2882 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2883 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2884
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002885- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2886 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2887 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2888 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2889 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2890 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2891 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2892
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002893- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2894 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2895 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2896 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2897 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2898
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002899- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2900 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002901
2902- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2903 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2904 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2905 #693195.)
2906
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002907- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2908 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002909
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002910- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002911 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002912 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2913 interpreter executions, would fail.
2914
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002915- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002916 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002917 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002918
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002919Extension modules
2920-----------------
2921
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002922- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2923 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2924 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2925 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2926
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002927- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2928 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2929
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002930- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2931 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2932 and Greg Chapman.)
2933
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002934- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2935 recursively.
2936
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002937- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002938 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2939 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2940 leaks.
2941
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002942- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2943
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002944- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2945 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2946 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2947 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2948 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2949 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2950 #705836.
2951
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002952- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002953 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2954
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002955- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2956 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2957 See SF bug #692416.
2958
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002959- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2960 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2961
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002962- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2963 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2964 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002965
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002966- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002967 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2968 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2969
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002970- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2971 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2972 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2973 timeouts to work properly.
2974
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002975Library
2976-------
2977
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002978- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2979 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2980 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2981 future release.
2982
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002983- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2984 for querying platform dependent features.
2985
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002986- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002987
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002988- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2989 pickle protocol versions.
2990
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002991- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2992 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2993 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2994
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002995- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2996
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002997- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2998 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2999 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3000 modules.
3001
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003002- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3003 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3004 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3005
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003006- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3007 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3008
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003009- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3010 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3011 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3012
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003013- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003014 MS Office extensions.
3015
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003016- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3017 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3018
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003019- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3020 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3021
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003022- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3023 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3024 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3025 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3026 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3027 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3028
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003029- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3030 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3031 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003032
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003033- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3034 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3035 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3036
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003037- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3038
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003039- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3040 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3041 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3042
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003043Tools/Demos
3044-----------
3045
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003046- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3047 See the module docstring for details.
3048
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003049Build
3050-----
3051
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003052- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3053 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003054
3055C API
3056-----
3057
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003058- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3059
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003060- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3061 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3062 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3063
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003064- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3065 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003066
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003067 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3068 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3069 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003070
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003071- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003072 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3073
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003074- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3075 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3076 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003077
3078New platforms
3079-------------
3080
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003081None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003082
3083Tests
3084-----
3085
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003086- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3087 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003088
3089Windows
3090-------
3091
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003092- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3093 function.
3094
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003095- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3096 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003097
3098Mac
3099---
3100
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003101- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3102 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003103
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003104- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3105 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003106
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003107- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3108 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3109 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003110
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003111- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003112 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3113 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003114
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003115- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3116 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003117
3118
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003119What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3120=================================
3121
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003122*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003123
3124Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003125-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003126
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003127- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3128 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3129 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3130
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003131- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3132 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3133 (SF patch #664376.)
3134
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003135- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3136 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3137 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3138 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3139 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3140 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003141 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003142
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003143- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3144 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3145 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3146 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003147 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003148
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003149- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3150 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3151 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3152 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3153 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3154 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3155 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3156 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3157 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3158 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3159 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3160
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003161- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3162 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3163 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3164 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3165 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3166 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3167
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003168- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3169 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3170
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003171- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3172 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3173 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3174 case.)
3175
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003176- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3177 passed as unicode strings.
3178
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003179- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3180 See SF bug #683467.
3181
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003182- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3183 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3184
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003185- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3186
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003187- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3188
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003189- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3190 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3191 arguments.
3192
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003193- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3194 See SF bug #667147.
3195
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003196- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003197 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003198 See SF bug #676155.
3199
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003200- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003201 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003202 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3203 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3204 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3205 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3206 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3207 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003208
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003209Extension modules
3210-----------------
3211
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003212- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3213 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3214 tp_as_number pointer.
3215
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003216- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3217 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3218 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3219 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3220 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3221
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003222- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3223
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003224- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3225
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003226- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003227 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003228 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3229 patch #678531.)
3230
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003231- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3232 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3233
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003234- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3235 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3236
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003237- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3238
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003239- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3240 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3241 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3242
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003243- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3244
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003245- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3246 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3247
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003248- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003249
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003250- datetime changes:
3251
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003252 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3253
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003254 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3255 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3256 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3257 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3258 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3259 now.
3260
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003261 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003262 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3263 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003264
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003265 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003266 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003267 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3268 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3269 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3270 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003271
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003272 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3273 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3274 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003275 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3276
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003277 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3278 by a later example coded by Guido.
3279
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003280 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003281 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3282 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3283 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003284 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3285 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3286
3287 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3288 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3289 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3290 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3291 tzinfo subclass instance.
3292
3293 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3294 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3295 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3296 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3297 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3298 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3299 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3300 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003301
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003302 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3303 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3304 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3305 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3306 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003307 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3308
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003309 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003310
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003311 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3312 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3313 as a naive datetime object.
3314
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003315 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3316 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3317 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3318
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003319 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3320 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3321 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3322 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3323 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3324 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3325 comparison.
3326
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003327 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3328 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3329 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3330 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003331 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003332
3333 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003334
3335 and ::
3336
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003337 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3338
3339 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3340 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3341 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3342 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3343
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003344 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3345 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3346 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3347 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3348 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3349
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003350 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3351 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003352 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3353 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003354
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003355Library
3356-------
3357
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003358- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3359 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3360
3361- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3362 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3363 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3364 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3365 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3366 See PEP 307 for details.
3367
3368- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3369 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3370
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003371- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3372 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003373 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003374 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3375 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003376 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003377
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003378- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3379 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3380
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003381- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3382 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3383 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3384
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003385- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3386
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003387- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3388 exception.
3389
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003390- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3391 class.
3392
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003393- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3394 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3395 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3396
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003397- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3398 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3399
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003400- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003401 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3402 See SF bug #659228.
3403
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003404- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3405 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3406 See SF patch #651082.
3407
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003408- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003409
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003410- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3411 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3412
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003413- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003414 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003415
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003416- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3417 DOS paths from other platforms.
3418
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003419Tools/Demos
3420-----------
3421
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003422- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3423 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3424 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3425 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3426 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3427 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3428 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3429 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3430 example:
3431
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003432 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3433 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003434
3435 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3436
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003437
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003438Build
3439-----
3440
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003441- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3442 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3443 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003444 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3445
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003446 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3447
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003448- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3449 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3450 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3451 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3452 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3453 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3454 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3455 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3456 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3457
3458- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3459 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3460 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3461 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3462
3463- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3464 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3465
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003466C API
3467-----
3468
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003469- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3470 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003471
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003472- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3473 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3474 tp_as_number pointer.
3475
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003476- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3477 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3478 (SF #681367)
3479
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003480- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3481 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3482 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3483 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003484
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003485Tests
3486-----
3487
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003488- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003489 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3490 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3491 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3492 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3493 pydoc.)
3494
3495- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3496
3497- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003498
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003499Windows
3500-------
3501
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003502- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3503 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3504 time).
3505
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003506- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3507 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3508
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003509- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3510 release without strong cryptography.
3511
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003512- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003513 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003514
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003515- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3516 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3517
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003518Mac
3519---
3520
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003521- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3522 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003523
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003524- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3525 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3526 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003527
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003528- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3529 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003530
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003531- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3532 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3533 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3534 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003535
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003536- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003537 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3538 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3539 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003540
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003541
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003542What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003543=================================
3544
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003545*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003546
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003547Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003548--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003549
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003550- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3551
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003552- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3553 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003554 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003555 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003556 a different meaning than before.
3557
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003558- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003559 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003560 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003561
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003562- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003563 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003564 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003565
3566- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3567 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3568 and deallocation.
3569
3570- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3571 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3572
3573- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3574 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3575 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3576 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3577 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3578
3579- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3580 now detected by the garbage collector.
3581
3582- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3583 [SF bug 519621]
3584
3585- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3586 identifier.
3587
3588- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3589 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3590 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3591 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3592 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3593 [SF bug 563060]
3594
3595- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3596 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3597 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3598 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3599 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3600
3601- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3602 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3603 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3604
3605- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3606
3607- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3608 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3609 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3610 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3611 state of the slots would be lost.)
3612
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003613Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003614-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003615
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003616- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003617 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3618 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3619 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3620 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003621 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3622 Jython 2.1.
3623
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003624- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003625 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003626 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3627 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3628 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3629 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3630 these, see PEP 302.
3631
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003632- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3633 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3634 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3635
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003636- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3637 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3638 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3639
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003640- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3641 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3642 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3643
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003644- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3645 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3646 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3647 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3648 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3649 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3650 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3651 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3652 releases or implementations.
3653
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003654- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003655 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3656 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003657
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003658- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3659 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3660
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003661- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3662 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3663 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3664
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003665- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3666 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3667
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003668- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3669 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003670 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3671 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003672
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003673- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3674 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3675 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3676 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3677 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3678
3679 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3680 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3681 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3682 pattern.
3683
3684 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3685 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3686 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3687 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3688
3689 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3690 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3691 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3692 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3693 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3694 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3695
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003696- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3697 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3698 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3699 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3700 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3701 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3702 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3703 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003704
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003705- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3706 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3707 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3708 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3709 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003710 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3711 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3712 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3713 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3714 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3715 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3716 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003717
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003718- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3719 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3720
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003721- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3722 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3723 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3724 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3725 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3726 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3727 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3728 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3729 to Zack Weinberg!
3730
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003731- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3732 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3733 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3734 type. This has been fixed now.
3735
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003736- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3737 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3738 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3739
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003740- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3741 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3742 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3743 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3744 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3745 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3746 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3747 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003748 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003749
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003750- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3751 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3752 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003753
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003754- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3755 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3756 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3757 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3758 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3759 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3760 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3761 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003762 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003763 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3764 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3765
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003766- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3767 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3768 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3769 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3770 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3771 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3772 this.)
3773
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003774- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3775 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003776 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003777 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003778 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3779 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003780 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3781 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003782
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003783- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3784 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3785 currently running.
3786
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003787- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3788 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3789 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3790 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3791
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003792- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3793 as directory names.
3794
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003795- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3796 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3797
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003798- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3799 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3800
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003801- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003802 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3803 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003804
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003805- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3806 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3807 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3808 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3809 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3810
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003811- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3812 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3813 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3814 removed.
3815
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003816- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3817 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3818 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3819
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003820- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3821 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3822 to __debug__.
3823
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003824- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3825 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3826 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3827
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003828- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3829 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3830 deprecated now.
3831
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003832- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3833 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3834 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003835
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003836- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3837 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3838 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3839 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3840 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003841
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003842- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3843 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3844
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003845- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3846 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3847 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003848 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003849 is backward compatible.
3850
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003851- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3852 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3853 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3854 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3855 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3856
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003857- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3858 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3859 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3860 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3861 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3862 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003863
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003864- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3865 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3866
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003867- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3868 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3869
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003870- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3871 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3872 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3873 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3874 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3875
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003876- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3877 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3878 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3879
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003880- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003881 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3882
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003883- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3884 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3885 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003886
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003887- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3888 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3889
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003890- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3891 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3892 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3893
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003894- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3895
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003896Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003897-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003898
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003899- Added three operators to the operator module:
3900 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3901 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3902 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3903
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003904- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3905
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003906- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3907 archives.
3908
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003909- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3910 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3911 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3912
3913 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3914
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003915- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3916 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3917 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003918 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003919
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003920- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3921 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3922 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3923 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003924 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3925 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3926 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3927 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003928
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003929- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3930 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003931
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003932- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3933
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003934- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3935 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3936
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003937- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3938 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3939 supported.
3940
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003941- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3942
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003943- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3944 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003945
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003946- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3947 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3948
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003949- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3950
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003951- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3952 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3953
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003954- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3955 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3956 functions but callable type objects.
3957
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003958- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003959 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003960 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003961
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003962- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3963 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003964
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003965- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3966 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003967
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003968- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3969 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3970 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3971 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3972
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003973- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3974 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003975
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003976- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3977 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3978 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3979 and __imul__.
3980
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003981- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003982 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3983 is called.
3984
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003985- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3986 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3987 interpreter was compiled.
3988
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003989- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3990 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3991 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003992 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003993 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3994 1, not 2.
3995
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003996- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3997 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3998 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3999 limit.
4000
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004001- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4002 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4003 bug #623464.
4004
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004005- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4006 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4007 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4008 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4009
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004010Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004011-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004012
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004013- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4014
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004015- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4016 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4017 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4018 with Python 2.3a2.
4019
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004020- os.path exposes getctime.
4021
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004022- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004023 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004024 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004025 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004026 unit tests of floating point results.
4027
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004028- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4029 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4030 has been increased.
4031
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004032- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4033 executed.
4034
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004035- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4036 postinstallation script.
4037
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004038- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4039 test the current module.
4040
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004041- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004042 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4043 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4044 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4045 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4046
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004047- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004048 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004049 Ward's Optik package.
4050
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004051- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4052 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4053 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4054 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4055
4056- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4057 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004058 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004059
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004060- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4061 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4062 shelf are binary pickles.
4063
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004064- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4065 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4066
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004067- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4068 modules are iterators now.
4069
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004070- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4071 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4072 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4073 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4074 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4075 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004076
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004077- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4078 with their entity value.
4079
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004080- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4081
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004082- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4083 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004084
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004085- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4086 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004087 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004088
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004089- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4090 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4091 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4092 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4093 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4094 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4095 main():
4096
4097 import locale
4098 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4099
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004100- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4101 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4102
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004103- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4104 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4105 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4106 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4107 to the new standard.
4108
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004109- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4110 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4111 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4112 an extension to the database.
4113
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004114- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4115 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4116 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4117 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004118 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004119
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004120- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004121 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004122
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004123- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4124 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4125 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4126 bounded integers.
4127
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004128- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4129 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4130 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4131 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4132 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4133 in existence.
4134
4135 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4136 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4137 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4138 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4139 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4140 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4141
4142 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4143 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4144 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4145 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4146
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004147- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4148 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4149 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4150
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004151- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4152
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004153- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4154 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4155 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4156 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4157
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004158- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4159 argument.
4160
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004161- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4162 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4163 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4164 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4165 [SF patch 560794].
4166
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004167- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4168 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4169 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004170 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4171 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4172 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004173
4174- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4175 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004176
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004177- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4178 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4179 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4180 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004181
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004182- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4183 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4184 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4185 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4186 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4187
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004188- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004189
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004190- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4191
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004192- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4193 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4194 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4195 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4196 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4197 identical to None.
4198
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004199- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4200 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4201 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4202 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4203 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4204 results now.
4205
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004206- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4207 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4208
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004209- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4210 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4211 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4212 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4213 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4214 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4215 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4216 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4217
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004218- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4219
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004220- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4221 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4222
4223- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4224 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4225 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4226 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4227 and other systems.
4228
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004229- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4230 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4231 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4232 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 +00004233 work well with these.
4234
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004235- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4236
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004237- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004238 connections.
4239
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004240- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4241 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4242 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4243
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004244- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4245 sets
4246
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004247- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4248 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4249 name.
4250
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004251- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4252 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4253 passed in.
4254
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004255- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004256 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004257 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4258 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004259
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004260- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4261
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004262- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4263
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004264- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4265 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4266 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4267
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004268- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4269 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4270 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4271 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004272 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004273
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004274- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004275 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004276 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004277
4278- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4279 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4280 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4281
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004282- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004283 the value of its expression argument.
4284
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004285- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4286 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4287 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4288
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004289- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4290 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4291 skipstone browser was included.
4292
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004293- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4294 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4295
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004296Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004297-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004298
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004299- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4300 names in addition to accepting file names.
4301
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004302- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4303 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4304 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4305 still used and useful.)
4306
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004307- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4308 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4309 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4310 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004311
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004312- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4313 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4314 the generated binary.
4315
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004316Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004317-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004318
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004319- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4320
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004321- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4322 except in the hands of experts.
4323
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004324- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004325 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4326 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4327 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004328
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004329- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4330 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4331 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4332 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4333 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4334 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4335 builds.
4336
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004337- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4338 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4339 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4340 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4341 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4342 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4343 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4344 new type.
4345
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004346- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004347
4348 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4349 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4350 positive infinities.
4351
4352 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4353 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4354 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4355 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4356 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4357 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4358 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4359
4360 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4361
4362 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4363
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004364- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4365 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4366 size of the executable.
4367
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004368- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4369 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4370 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4371 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004372
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004373- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4374
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004375- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4376 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4377 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004378
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004379- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4380 well as Unix.
4381
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004382- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4383 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4384 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4385 modules in the README file for details.
4386
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004387C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004388-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004389
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004390- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4391 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004392 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004393 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004394 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004395
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004396- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4397 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4398 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4399 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4400 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4401 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004402 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004403 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4404 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4405 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4406 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4407 aligned.)
4408
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004409- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4410 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4411 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4412
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004413- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4414 level.
4415
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004416- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4417 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4418 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4419 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4420 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4421
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004422- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4423 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4424 code.
4425
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004426- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4427 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4428 adjusting for negative indices.
4429
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004430- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4431 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4432 object.
4433
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004434- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4435 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4436 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4437
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004438- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4439 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004440
4441- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4442
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004443- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4444 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4445 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4446 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4447
4448- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4449
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004450- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004451
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004452- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004453 without going through the buffer API.
4454
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004455- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004456
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004457- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4458 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4459 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4460 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4461
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004462- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4463 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4464
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004465- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004466 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4467
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004468New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004470
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004471- OpenVMS is now supported.
4472
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004473- AtheOS is now supported.
4474
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004475- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4476
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004477- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4478
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004479Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004480-----
4481
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004482- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4483 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4484 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004485
4486Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004487-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004488
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004489- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4490 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4491 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4492 bugs.
4493 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004494 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004495 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4496 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004497 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004498
4499- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004500 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004501
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004502- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4503 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4504
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004505- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4506 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004507 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004508 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4509
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004510- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4511 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4512 use files" uninstall option).
4513
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004514- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4515
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004516- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4517 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4518
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004519- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4520 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4521 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4522
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004523- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4524 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4525 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4526 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4527 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004528 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4529 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4530 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004531
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004532- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004533 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004534 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4535 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4536 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4537 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4538 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4539 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4540 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4541 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4542 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4543 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4544 work around.
4545
4546- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4547 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4548 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4549 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4550 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4551 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4552 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4553 specified with O_CREAT too).
4554
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004555Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004556----
4557
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004558- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004559
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004560- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4561 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4562 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4563
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004564- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4565 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4566 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4567
4568- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4569 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4570 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4571 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4572 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4573 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4574 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4575 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004576
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004577- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4578 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4579 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004580
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004581- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4582 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4583 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4584 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4585 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004586
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004587- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4588 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4589 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004590
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004591- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4592 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004593
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004594- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4595 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4596 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4597 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4598 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004599
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004600- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4601 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4602 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4603
4604- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4605 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4606 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004607
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004608- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4609 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4610 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4611 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004612 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004613
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004614- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4615 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004616
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004617- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4618 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004619
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004620- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004621 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004622 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4623 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004624
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004625
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004626What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004627===============================
4628
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004629*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4630
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004631Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004632--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004633
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004634- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4635 with a custom metaclass.
4636
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004637Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004638-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004639
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004640- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4641 are proxies.
4642
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004643Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004644-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004645
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004646- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4647 very short strings.
4648
4649- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4650 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4651 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4652 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4653 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4654
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004655Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004656-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004657
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004658- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4659 close or delete time).
4660
4661- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4662 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4663
4664- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4665
4666- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004667 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004668
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004669Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004670-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004671
4672Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004673-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004674
4675C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004676-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004677
4678New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004679-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004680
4681Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004682-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004683
4684Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004685-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004686
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004687- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4688
4689- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4690 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4691
4692- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4693 deleted at process exit time.
4694
4695- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4696 in backslash.
4697
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004698Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004699----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004700
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004701- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4702 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4703 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4704
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004705
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004706What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004707===========================
4708
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004709*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4710
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004711Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004712--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004713
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004714- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4715 been extensively updated. See
4716
4717 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4718
4719 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4720
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004721- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4722 deleted!
4723
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004724- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4725 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4726 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4727 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4728 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4729
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004730- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4731
4732 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4733 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4734
4735 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4736 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4737 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4738 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4739 supported anyway.
4740
4741 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4742 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4743
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004744- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4745 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4746 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4747 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4748 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004749
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004750- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4751 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4752 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4753
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004754Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004755-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004756
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004757- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4758 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4759 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4760 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4761 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4762 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004763 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4764 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4765 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4766 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004767
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004768- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4769 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4770 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4771
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004772Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004773-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004774
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004775- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4776
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004777Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004778-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004779
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004780- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4781 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4782 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4783 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4784 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4785 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4786
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004787- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4788
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004789- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4790
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004791- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4792
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004793- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4794 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4795 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4796
4797- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4798
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004799Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004800-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004801
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004802- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4803 off a search on Google.
4804
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004805Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004806-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004807
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004808- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4809 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4810 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4811 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4812 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4813 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4814 other platforms should do likewise.
4815
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004816- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4817 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4818 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4819
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004820C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004821-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004822
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004823- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4824 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4825 producing key-value pairs.
4826
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004827- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004828 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004829 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4830 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4831 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4832 previously went unchallenged.
4833
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004834New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004835-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004836
4837Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004838-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004839
4840Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004841-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004842
4843Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004844----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004845
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004846- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4847 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004848
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004849- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4850 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4851 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4852 home.
4853
4854
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004855What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004856===========================
4857
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004858*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4859
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004860Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004861--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004862
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004863- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4864 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004865
4866 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004867 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004868
4869 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4870 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004871 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004872 This needs to be documented.
4873
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004874- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4875 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4876
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004877- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4878 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4879 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4880
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004881- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4882 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4883
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004884- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4885 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4886 class forbids it).
4887
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004888- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4889 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4890 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4891
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004892- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4893
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004894Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004895-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004896
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004897- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4898 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004899 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004900
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004901- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4902 (like 1 + '').
4903
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004904Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004905-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004906
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004907- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4908 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4909 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4910 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004911 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004912 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4913
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004914- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4915 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4916 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4917 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4918
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004919- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4920 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004921 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4922 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4923 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004924
4925- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4926 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004927
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004928- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4929 bytes on its input.
4930
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004931Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004932-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004933
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004934- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004935 convenience function.
4936
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004937- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4938 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4939 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004940 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4941 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4942 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4943 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4944 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4945 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004946
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004947- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4948 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4949 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4950 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4951
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004952- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4953 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4954 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4955
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004956- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4957 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4958 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4959 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4960
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004961- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4962 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004963 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004964 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4965 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4966 new -l and -e options.
4967
4968- statcache is now deprecated.
4969
4970- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4971 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004972 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004973 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4974 time properly taken into account.
4975
4976- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4977 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4978 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4979 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4980
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004981Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004982-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004983
4984Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004985-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004986
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004987- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4988 is built with libdb3 if available.
4989
4990- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4991
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004992C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004993-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004994
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004995- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4996 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4997 PySequence_Size().
4998
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004999- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5000
5001- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5002 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5003 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5004
5005- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5006 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5007
5008- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5009 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5010
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005011New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005012-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005013
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005014- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5015 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5016
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005017- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5018 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5019
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005020- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5021
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005022Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005023-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005024
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005025- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5026 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5027
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005028Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005029-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005030
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005031Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005032----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005033
5034- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5035 removed completely in the next release.
5036
5037- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5038 OSX.
5039
5040- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5041 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5042
5043- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5044
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005045
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005046What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005047===========================
5048
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005049*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5050
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005051Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005052--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005053
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005054- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005055 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005056 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005057 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5058 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005059 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5060 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005061 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5062 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005063
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005064- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5065 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5066
5067- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5068 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5069
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005070Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005071-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005072
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005073- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5074 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5075 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5076 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5077 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5078 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5079 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5080 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5081
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005082- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5083 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5084 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5085 example).
5086
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005087- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005088 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005089 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005090 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005091
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005092- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5093 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5094 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005095 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005096
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005097- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5098 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5099 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5100 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5101 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5102 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5103
5104 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5105
5106 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5107
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005108Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005109-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005110
5111- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5112
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005113- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5114
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005115- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5116 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005117
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005118- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5119 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5120 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5121 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5122 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5123 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005124 attributes.
5125
5126- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5127 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5128 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005129
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005130- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5131 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5132 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005133
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005134- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5135 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5136 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005137 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5138 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5139
5140- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5141 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005142
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005143Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005144-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005145
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005146- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5147 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5148
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005149- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5150 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5151 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5152 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5153
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005154- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5155 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5156 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5157 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5158
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005159 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5160 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5161 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5162 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5163 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5164 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5165 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5166 without losing information).
5167
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005168- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005169 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5170 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5171 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5172 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5173 module).
5174
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005175 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005176 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5177 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5178 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5179 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005180
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005181- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005182 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5183 encoding.
5184
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005185- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5186 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5187
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005188- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005189 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5190
5191- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5192 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5193 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5194 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5195
5196- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5197
5198- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5199 ON, and OFF.
5200
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005201- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5202 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5203
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005204Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005205-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005206
5207- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5208 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5209 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005210
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005211- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5212 been added: -X and -E.
5213
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005214Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005215-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005216
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005217- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5218 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5219
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005220C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005221-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005222
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005223- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5224 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5225 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5226 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5227 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5228
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005229- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5230 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5231 as long) arguments.
5232
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005233- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5234 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5235 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5236 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5237 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5238 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5239
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005240- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5241 input.
5242
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005243New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005244-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005245
5246Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005247-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005248
5249Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005250-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005251
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005252- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5253 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5254 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5255
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005256- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5257 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5258 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005259 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005260
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005261 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5262 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5263 import signal
5264 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005265
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005266 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005267 while 1:
5268 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005269 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005270 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5271 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5272 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5273 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005274
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005275
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005276What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5277===========================
5278
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005279*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5280
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005281Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005282--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005283
5284- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5285 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5286 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5287
5288- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5289 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5290 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5291 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5292 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5293 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5294 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005295
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005296- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005297 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005298 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5299 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5300 associate a docstring with a property.
5301
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005302- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5303 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5304 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5305 other built-in object types.
5306
5307- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5308 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5309 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5310 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5311 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5312
5313- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5314 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5315
5316- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5317 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005318 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005319 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5320 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5321 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5322 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5323 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5324
5325- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5326 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5327 class.
5328
5329- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5330 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5331 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5332 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5333
5334- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5335 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5336 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5337 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5338
5339- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5340 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5341
5342- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5343 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5344 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5345 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5346 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005347 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005348 with the same value as s.
5349
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005350- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5351
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005352Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005353----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005354
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005355- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5356
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005357- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5358 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5359 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5360 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5361 objects.
5362
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005363- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5364 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005365 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5366 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5367
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005368- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5369 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5370 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5371
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005372Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005373-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005374
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005375- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5376 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5377 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5378 by the instances.
5379
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005380- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5381 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5382 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5383
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005384- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5385 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5386 before the entire comparison is complete.
5387
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005388- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5389 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5390 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5391
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005392- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5393 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5394 getwriter().
5395
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005396- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5397 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5398
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005399- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005400 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5401 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5402
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005403- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5404 iterable object.
5405
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005406- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5407 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005408
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005409- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5410 authentication.
5411
5412- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5413 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005414
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005415- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005416 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5417 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5418 a sample driver.)
5419
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005420Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005421-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005422
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005423- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5424 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5425 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5426 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5427 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5428 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5429 kernel has large file support.
5430
5431- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5432 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5433 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5434 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5435 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5436
5437- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5438 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5439 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5440
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005441C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005442-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005443
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005444- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5445 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5446
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005447New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005448-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005449
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005450- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5451 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5452
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005453Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005454-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005455
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005456- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5457 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5458 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5459 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5460 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5461
5462- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5463 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5464 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5465 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5466
5467- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5468 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5469
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005470Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005471-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005472
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005473- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005474 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5475 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005476
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005477
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005478What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5479===========================
5480
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005481*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5482
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005483Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005484----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005485
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005486- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5487 big to represent as a C double.
5488
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005489- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5490 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5491 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5492 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5493 restriction).
5494
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005495- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5496 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5497 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5498 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5499 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5500
5501 >>> dir([])
5502 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5503 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5504 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5505 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5506 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5507 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5508 'reverse', 'sort']
5509
5510 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5511
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005512- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005513 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5514 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5515 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5516 OverflowError exception.
5517
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005518- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005519 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005520 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5521 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5522 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5523 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5524 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005525 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005526 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5527 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5528
5529 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5530 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5531 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5532 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005533
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005534- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005535 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5536 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5537 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5538 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5539 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5540 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5541 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5542 once it is created.
5543
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005544- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5545 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5546 (key, value) pairs.
5547
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005548- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005549 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5550 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5551
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005552- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5553 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5554 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5555 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5556 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005557
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005558- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005559 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5560 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5561
5562 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5563
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005564- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005565 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5566
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005567Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005568-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005569
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005570- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005571 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5572 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005573
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005574- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5575 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5576 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5577 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5578 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5579 in this area anymore).
5580
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005581- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5582 threading.Timer.
5583
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005584- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5585 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5586
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005587- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005588 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5589
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005590- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005591 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5592 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5593 converted to Python longs.
5594
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005595- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005596 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5597
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005598- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5599 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5600 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5601
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005602Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005603-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005604
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005605- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5606 division operators as per PEP 238.
5607
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005608Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005609-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005610
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005611- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5612 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5613 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5614 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5615
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005616C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005617-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005618
5619- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005620
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005621- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5622 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005623 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005624
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005625 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5626 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005627 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005628 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005629
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005630- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005631 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5632 module:
5633
5634 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005635
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005636 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5637 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005638
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005639 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5640 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005641
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005642 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5643
5644 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5645
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005646- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005647 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5648 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5649 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005650
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005651New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005652-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005653
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005654- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5655 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5656 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5657 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5658 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005659
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005660Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005661-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005662
5663Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005664-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005665
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005666- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5667 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5668 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5669 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005670 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5671 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5672 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5673 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5674 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005675
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005676- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005677 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5678
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005679
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005680What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5681===========================
5682
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005683*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5684
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005685Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005686-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005687
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005688- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5689 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5690
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005691- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5692 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5693 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005694
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005695- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5696 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5697 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5698 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005699
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005700- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5701
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005702- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005703
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005704Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005705-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005706
5707- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005708 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005709 the module docstring for details.
5710
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005711Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005712-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005713
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005714- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005715 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5716 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5717 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005718
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005719- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5720 Nick Mathewson.
5721
5722Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005723----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005724
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005725- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5726 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5727 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5728 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5729 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5730 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5731 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5732 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5733
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005734- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5735 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5736 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5737 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5738
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005739- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5740 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5741 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5742 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5743 come a long way).
5744
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005745- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5746 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5747 write filters for these warnings).
5748
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005749- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5750 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5751 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5752 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5753 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5754
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005755- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5756 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5757 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5758 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5759 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5760 older distribution.
5761
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005762Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005763-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005764
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005765- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5766 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005767 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005768
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005769- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5770 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5771 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5772
5773- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5774
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005775- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5776
5777- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5778
5779- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5780
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005781- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005782
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005783- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5784
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005785New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005786-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005787
5788C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005789-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005790
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005791- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5792 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5793 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5794 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5795 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5796 against buffer overruns.
5797
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005798- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005799 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5800 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005801 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5802 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5803 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5804
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005805- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5806 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5807 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5808 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5809 deprecated.
5810
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005811Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005812-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005813
5814- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5815 relevant is found.
5816
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005817
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005818What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005819===========================
5820
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005821*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5822
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005823Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005824----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005825
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005826- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5827 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5828 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5829 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5830 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5831 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5832 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5833 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005834 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005835 repaired.
5836
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005837- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005838 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005839 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5840 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5841 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5842 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5843 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5844 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5845 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5846 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5847
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005848- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5849 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5850 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5851 leading BMO character).
5852
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005853- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5854 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5855 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5856
5857 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5858 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5859 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005860
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005861 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5862 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5863 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5864 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5865 for various simple to use conversions.
5866
5867 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5868 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5869
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005870 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5871 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5872 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5873 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5874 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5875 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5876 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5877 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5878 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5879 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5880 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5881 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5882 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5883 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5884 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005885
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005886- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5887 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5888 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005889 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005890 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005891
5892 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005893 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5894 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5895 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5896 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5897 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005898 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5899 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005900
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005901 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5902 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5903 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005904 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005905
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005906- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5907 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5908 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5909 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5910 floating arithmetic,
5911
5912 x = 9007199254740992.0
5913 print long(x)
5914
5915 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5916 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5917 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5918 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5919 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5920 functions are of good quality).
5921
5922 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5923 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5924 algorithms to break.
5925
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005926- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5927 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5928 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5929 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5930 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5931 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5932 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5933 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5934 order.
5935
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005936- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5937 operation along the most common code paths.
5938
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005939- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5940 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5941
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005942- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5943 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5944 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5945 {}.update(UserDict())
5946
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005947- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5948 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5949 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5950 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5951 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5952 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5953 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5954 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5955
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005956- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005957 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005958
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005959 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005960 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5961 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005962 join() method of strings
5963 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005964 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5965 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005966 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005967 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005968
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005969- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5970 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5971
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005972- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5973 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5974
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005975- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5976 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5977 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5978 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5979
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005980- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5981 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005982 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005983 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5984 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005985
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005986- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5987
5988
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005989Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005990-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005991
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005992- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005993 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005994 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5995 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5996
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005997- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5998 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5999
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006000- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6001 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6002 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6003 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6004
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006005- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6006 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6007 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6008
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006009- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6010
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006011- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6012
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006013- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6014 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6015 that are still imported into string.py).
6016
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006017- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6018
6019- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6020 Now it does.
6021
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006022- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6023
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006024- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6025 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6026 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6027 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6028 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006029 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6030 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006031
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006032- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6033 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6034 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6035 'help(object)'.
6036
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006037Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006038-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006039
6040- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006041 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006042 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6043 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6044
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006045- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006046 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6047 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006048
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006049C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006050-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006051
6052- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6053 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006054
6055----
6056
6057**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**