blob: 9af61e10540d74bab79f2ff51511e2b65b196ddc [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
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000015- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
16
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000017- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
18 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
19 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
20
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000021- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
22 configure would break checking curses.h.
23
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000024- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
25 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
26
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000027- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
28
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000029- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
30
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000031- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
32
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000033- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
34 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
35
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000036- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
37 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
38 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
39
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000040- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
41 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000042 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000043
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000044- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
45 now encodes backslash correctly.
46
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000047- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
48
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000049- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
50 and long longs.
51
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000052- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
53 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
54 message in this case.
55
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000056- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
57 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
58 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
59 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
60 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
61
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000062- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000063
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000064- Speed up some Unicode operations.
65
66- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
67
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000068- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000069 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
70
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000071- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
72
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000073- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
74 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
75
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000076- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
77
78- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
79
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000080- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
81 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
82 was empty.
83
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000084- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
85 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
86
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000087- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000088 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000089
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000090- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
91 codes.
92
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000093- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
94 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
95 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
96
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000097- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
98 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
99
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000100- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000101 (fixes bug #1119418).
102
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000103- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
104
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000105- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
106 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
107
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000108- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
109 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
110 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
111
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000112- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
113
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000114- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
115 reference counts in some error exit cases.
116
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000117- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
118 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
119 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
120 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
121 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
122 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
123 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
124 realloc.
125
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000126- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
127 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
128
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000129- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
130 like their int counterparts.
131
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000132- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
133 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
134 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
135 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
136 for a longer write-up of the problem).
137
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000138- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
139 serializing floats.
140
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000141- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
142 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
143 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
144
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000145- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
146 278.
147
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000148- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
149 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
150 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
151 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000152 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000153 PyNumber_*().
154 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
155
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000156- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
157 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
158 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
159 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
160
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000161- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
162 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
163 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
164 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
165 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
166
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000167- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
168 disabled caused a crash.
169
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000170- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
171 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
172
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000173- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000174 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
175
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000176- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
177
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000178- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000179 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
180 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
181 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000182
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000183- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
184
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000185- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
186 returning None.
187
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000188- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000189 ('\') with a specific error message.
190
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000191- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
192
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000193- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
194 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
195
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000196- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000197 an ferror() call.
198
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000199- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
200 list.sort().
201
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000202- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
203 (2+3) --> (5).
204
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000205- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
206
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000207- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
208 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000209
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000210- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
211 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
212 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
213
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000214- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
215 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
216 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
217
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000218Extension Modules
219-----------------
220
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000221- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
222 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
223
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000224- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
225 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
226 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
227
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000228- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
229 than the system default domain.
230
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000231- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
232 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
233 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
234
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000235- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
236
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000237- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
238 before the env.
239
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000240- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
241
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000242- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
243
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000244- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
245 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
246 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
247
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000248- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
249 without prior setting of the userptr.
250
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000251- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
252
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000253- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
254
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000255- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
256 problem on AIX.
257
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000258- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
259
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000260- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
261
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000262- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
263
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000264- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
265 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
266
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000267- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
268 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
269
270- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
271
272- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000273
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000274- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
275 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
276
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000277- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
278
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000279- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
280 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
281
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000282- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
283 returns in cStringIO.c.
284
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000285- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
286 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
287
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000288- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
289
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000290- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
291
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000292- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
293 the file system encoding.
294
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000295- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
296 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000297
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000298- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
299
300- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000301 line without newlines.
302
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000303- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
304 on Windows.
305
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000306- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000307 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
308
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000309- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
310 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
311 for large or negative values.
312
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000313- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000314 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000315
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000316- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
317
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000318- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
319 if available on the platform.
320
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000321- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
322 available on the platform.
323
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000324- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
325 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
326
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000327- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
328
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000329- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
330 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
331 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
332
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000333- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
334
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000335- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
336 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
337
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000338- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000339 file size.
340
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000341- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
342
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000343- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
344 {remove_history,replace_history}
345
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000346- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
347 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000348
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000349- stat_float_times is now True.
350
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000351- array.array objects are now picklable.
352
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000353- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
354 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
355
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000356- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
357 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
358 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
359
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000360- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
361 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000362
363Library
364-------
365
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000366- The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed in pydoc.
367
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000368- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
369 unless the system is Win32.
370
Martin v. Löwisc81e3a62006-01-30 15:04:31 +0000371- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000372 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
373 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
374
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000375- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
376
377- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000378
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000379- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
380
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000381- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000382 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000383
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000384- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
385 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000386
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000387- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
388
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000389- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
390
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000391- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
392 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
393 LoadError subclasses IOError.
394
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000395- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000396 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
397 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
398 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
399 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
400
401 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
402 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
403 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
404 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
405 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000406
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000407- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
408 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
409 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
410
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000411- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
412
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000413- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
414
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000415- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
416 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
417 illegal argument)
418
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000419- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
420 is an error in the format string.
421
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000422- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
423
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000424- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000425 "parent" argument.
426
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000427- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
428 for padding.
429
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000430- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
431 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
432
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000433- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
434 to get the correct encoding.
435
436- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
437 languages.
438
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000439- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
440
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000441- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
442
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000443- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
444
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000445- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
446 functionality.
447
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000448- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
449
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000450- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
451 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
452
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000453- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
454 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
455 match the Content-Length header.
456
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000457- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
458
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000459- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
460 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000461 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000462
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000463- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
464
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000465- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
466
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000467- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
468 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
469
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000470- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
471 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
472 Tkdnd.
473
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000474- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
475 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
476
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000477- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
478 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
479
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000480- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000481 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
482
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000483- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
484 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
485
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000486- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
487 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
488
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000489- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000490 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000491
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000492- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
493
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000494- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
495 error messages.
496
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000497- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
498
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000499- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
500 Bug #1224621.
501
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000502- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
503 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
504 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
505 terminates by raising StopIteration.
506
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000507- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
508
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000509- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
510 component of the path.
511
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000512- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
513 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
514 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
515 class at all.
516
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000517- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
518 files to PyPI.
519
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000520- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
521 them to PyPI.
522
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000523- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
524 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
525 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
526 work as expected.
527
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000528- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
529 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
530
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000531- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000532 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
533
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000534- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
535
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000536- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
537 to build.
538
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000539- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
540 symbolic links on Windows.
541
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000542- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000543 profile.py if available.
544
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000545- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
546
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000547- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
548 in LWPCookieJar.
549
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000550- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
551
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000552- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
553
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000554- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
555
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000556- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
557
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000558- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
559
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000560- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
561
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000562- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
563
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000564- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
565
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000566- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
567 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
568 be exploited in various ways.
569
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000570- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000571 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
572
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000573- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
574 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
575
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000576- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000577 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
578
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000579- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
580
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000581- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
582
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000583- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
584
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000585- Enhancements to the csv module:
586
587 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000588 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000589 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000590 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
591 reporting.
592 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
593 dictates.
594 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000595 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000596 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000597 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
598 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000599 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
600 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000601 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000602 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
603 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
604 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
605 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
606 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
607 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
608 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
609 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
610 without first creating a dialect class.
611 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
612 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
613 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000614 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000615 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
616 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000617 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
618 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
619 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
620 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000621 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
622 This has been fixed.
623
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000624- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
625 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
626 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
627 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
628
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000629- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
630
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000631- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
632 (Bug #951915).
633
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000634- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
635 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
636 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000637 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000638
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000639- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
640
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000641- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
642 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
643
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000644- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
645
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000646- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
647
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000648- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
649
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000650- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
651
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000652- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
653
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000654- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
655 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
656 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
657
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000658- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000659 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000660
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000661- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
662 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
663 tokenizer with very long source lines.
664
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000665- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
666 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
667 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000668
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000669- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
670 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000671
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000672- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
673 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
674
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000675- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
676 correctly.
677
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000678- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
679 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
680 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
681 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
682 between two lines.
683
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000684- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
685 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
686 handlers.
687
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000688- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000689 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
690 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000691
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000692- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
693 considering it exactly like a '*'.
694
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000695- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
696 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000697
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000698- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
699
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000700- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
701 touch the recursion limit.
702
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000703Build
704-----
705
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000706- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
707
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000708- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
709
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000710- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
711
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000712- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
713
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000714- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
715 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
716
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000717- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
718
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000719- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
720 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
721
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000722- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
723 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
724
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000725- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
726 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
727 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000728 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000729
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000730- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
731 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
732 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
733
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000734- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
735
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000736- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
737 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
738
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000739- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
740 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
741 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
742 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
743 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
744 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
745 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
746 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
747
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000748- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
749 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
750 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
751 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
752
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000753C API
754-----
755
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000756- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
757
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000758- Removed PyRange_New().
759
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000760- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
761 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
762 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
763 mappings.
764
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000765
766Tests
767-----
768
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000769- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000770
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000771- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
772 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
773
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000774
775Documentation
776-------------
777
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000778- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
779
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000780- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
781 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
782
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000783- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
784
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000785- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
786
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000787- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
788
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000789- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
790
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000791- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
792
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000793- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
794
795- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
796
797- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
798
799- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
800
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000801- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
802 Closes bug #1166582.
803
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000804- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
805 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
806 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
807
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000808Mac
809---
810
811
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000812New platforms
813-------------
814
815- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
816
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000817
818Tools/Demos
819-----------
820
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000821- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
822 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
823 source files that need an encoding declaration.
824 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
825
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000826- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
827
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000828- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000829
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000830- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
831 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000832
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000833What's New in Python 2.4 final?
834===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000835
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000836*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000837
838Core and builtins
839-----------------
840
841- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
842 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
843 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
844
845
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000846What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
847==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000848
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000849*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000850
851Core and builtins
852-----------------
853
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000854- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
855 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
856 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
857
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000858
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000859Library
860-------
861
862- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
863 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
864 raised is re-raised.
865
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000866- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
867 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
868
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000869- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
870 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
871 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
872 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
873 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
874 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
875 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
876 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
877 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
878 by the slice are recomputed now.
879
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000880- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000881
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000882Build
883-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000884
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000885- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
886 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
887 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000888
889C API
890-----
891
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000892- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
893
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000894
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000895What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
896================================
897
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000898*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000899
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000900License
901-------
902
903The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
904is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
905changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
906Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
907intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
908durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
909the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
910License::
911
912 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
913
914says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
915to Python 2.1.1.
916
917The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
918License Version 2.
919
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000920Core and builtins
921-----------------
922
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000923- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
924 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
925 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
926 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
927 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
928 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
929 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000930 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000931 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
932 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
933
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000934- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000935
936Extension Modules
937-----------------
938
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000939- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
940 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
941 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
942 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000943
944Library
945-------
946
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000947- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
948 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
949 returned.
950
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000951- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
952
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000953- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
954 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
955
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000956- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
957
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000958- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
959 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000960
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000961- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
962
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000963- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
964
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000965- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000966 the source code is updated and reloaded.
967
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000968Build
969-----
970
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000971- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000972
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000973What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
974================================
975
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000976*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000977
978Core and builtins
979-----------------
980
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000981- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000982 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
983
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000984- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
985 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
986 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
987 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
988
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000989- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
990 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
991
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000992- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
993 constant.
994
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000995- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
996 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
997 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
998 large), and to anomalies such as
999 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1000 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1001 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1002 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001003
1004Extension modules
1005-----------------
1006
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001007- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1008 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001009 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1010 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1011 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001012
1013Library
1014-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001015
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001016- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001017 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001018 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1019 --swig-cpp.
1020
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001021- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1022 it is set.
1023
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001024- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001025
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001026- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1027 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1028 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1029 Closes bug #1039270.
1030
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001031- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001032
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001033 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001034 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1035 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1036 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1037 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1038 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1039 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1040 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1041 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1042 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1043 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1044 + Updates to documentation.
1045
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001046- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1047 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1048 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1049 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1050
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001051- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001052
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001053- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1054 applications should use the getmember function.
1055
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001056- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1057
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001058- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1059 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1060 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1061 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1062 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1063 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1064 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1065 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1066 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1067
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001068- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1069 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001070 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001071
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001072- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1073 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1074 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1075 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1076 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1077 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1078 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1079 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001080
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001081- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1082 the new public features (of which there are many).
1083
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001084- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001085 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1086 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1087 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1088 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001089 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001090
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001091- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1092
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001093- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1094 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1095 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1096 options.
1097
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001098- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1099 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1100 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1101 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1102 conditions under which non-string values work.
1103
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001104Build
1105-----
1106
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001107- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1108 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1109 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1110
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001111- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1112 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1113 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1114 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1115 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001116
1117C API
1118-----
1119
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001120- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1121 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1122
1123- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1124
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001125- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1126 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1127 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1128 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1129 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1130 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1131 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1132 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1133 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1134
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001135- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1136
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001137- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1138 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1139 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001140
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001141Tests
1142-----
1143
1144- test__locale ported to unittest
1145
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001146Mac
1147---
1148
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001149- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1150 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1151 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001152
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001153Tools/Demos
1154-----------
1155
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001156- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1157 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1158 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1159 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1160 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001161
1162
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001163What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1164=================================
1165
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001166*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001167
1168Core and builtins
1169-----------------
1170
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001171- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001172 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1173
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001174- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1175 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1176 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1177 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1178 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1179 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1180 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1181 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001182 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1183 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1184 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1185 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1186 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001187
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001188- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1189 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1190 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1191 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1192 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1193
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001194- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1195
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001196- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1197 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1198
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001199- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1200 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1201 modified the list.
1202
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001203- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1204 functions is now writable.
1205
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001206- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1207 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1208 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1209 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1210
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001211- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1212 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1213 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1214 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1215 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001216
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001217- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1218 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1219
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001220Extension modules
1221-----------------
1222
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001223- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1224
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001225- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1226 data.
1227
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001228- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1229 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1230 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1231 supposed to have been truncated away.
1232
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001233- Added socket.socketpair().
1234
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001235- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1236 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1237
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001238- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001239 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1240
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001241Library
1242-------
1243
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001244- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001245 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001246
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001247- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1248 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1249
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001250- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1251 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1252
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001253- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1254
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001255- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1256 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001257
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001258- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1259 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1260
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001261- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1262
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001263- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1264
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001265- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1266
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001267- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1268 Percivall.
1269
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001270- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1271 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1272
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001273- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1274 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1275 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001276 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001277
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001278- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1279 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1280 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1281 and exponent.
1282
1283- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1284
1285- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001286 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001287 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1288
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001289- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1290 to the readline module.
1291
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001292- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001293 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1294 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001295
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001296- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1297 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1298 contains symlinks.
1299
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001300- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1301 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1302
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001303- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1304 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1305 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1306
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001307- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1308 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1309 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1310 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1311 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1312 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1313 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1314 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1315 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1316 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1317 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1318 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1319 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1320
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001321- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1322
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001323Tools/Demos
1324-----------
1325
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001326- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1327 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1328
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001329- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1330
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001331Build
1332-----
1333
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001334- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1335 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1336 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1337 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1338 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1339 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1340 plans to do so.
1341
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001342- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1343 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1344
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001345- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1346 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1347
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001348- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1349 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1350
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001351- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1352 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1353
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001354- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1355 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1356
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001357C API
1358-----
1359
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001360..
1361
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001362Documentation
1363-------------
1364
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001365- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1366 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1367
1368- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1369 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1370 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001371
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001372New platforms
1373-------------
1374
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001375- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1376
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001377Tests
1378-----
1379
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001380..
1381
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001382Windows
1383-------
1384
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001385- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1386 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1387 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1388 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1389 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1390 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1391 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1392 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1393 the problem.
1394
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001395Mac
1396---
1397
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001398..
1399
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001400
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001401What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1402=================================
1403
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001404*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001405
1406Core and builtins
1407-----------------
1408
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001409- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1410 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1411 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1412 sensitive code.
1413
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001414- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001415 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001416
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001417 @staticmethod
1418 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001419
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001420 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001421
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001422- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1423 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1424 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1425 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1426 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1427 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1428 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1429 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1430 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1431 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1432 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1433
1434 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1435 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1436 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1437 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1438 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1439 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1440 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1441
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001442- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1443 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1444
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001445- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001446 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001447
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001448- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001449 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001450 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1451
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001452- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001453 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1454 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1455
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001456- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1457 types that support garbage collection.
1458
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001459- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1460
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001461- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1462 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1463 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1464 Jython.
1465
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001466- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1467
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001468- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1469 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1470
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001471- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1472 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1473 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001474
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001475- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1476 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1477 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1478
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001479Extension modules
1480-----------------
1481
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001482- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1483
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001484Library
1485-------
1486
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001487- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1488 TIS-620
1489
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001490- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1491 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1492 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1493 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1494 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1495 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1496 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1497 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1498 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1499 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1500
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001501- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1502
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001503- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1504 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1505 same as when the argument is omitted).
1506 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1507
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001508- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1509
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001510- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1511 schemes are offered.
1512
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001513- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1514
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001515- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1516 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1517 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1518
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001519- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1520
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001521- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1522 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1523
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001524- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1525 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1526 when dummy_threading is being used.
1527
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001528- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1529 from a tarfile.
1530
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001531- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001532 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001533
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001534- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1535 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1536 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1537 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1538
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001539- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1540 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1541
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001542- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1543 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1544 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1545 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1546 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1547 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1548 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1549 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1550 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1551 by some other method in progress).
1552
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001553- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1554 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1555 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001556
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001557- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1558
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001559- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1560 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1561 AM Kuchling.
1562
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001563- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1564 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1565 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1566
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001567- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1568 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1569 instead of unsigned.
1570
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001571- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001572 no longer part of the public API.
1573
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001574- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1575 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1576 string methods of the same name).
1577
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001578- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001579 SF patch 945642.
1580
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001581- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1582
1583 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1584
1585 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1586 DocTestSuites.
1587
1588- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1589 that provide thread-local data.
1590
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001591- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1592 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1593
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001594- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1595
1596- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1597 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1598 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1599
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001600- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1601
1602 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1603 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1604 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001605
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001606 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1607 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1608 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1609 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1610
1611 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1612 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1613
1614 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1615 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1616 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1617 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1618
1619 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1620 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1621 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1622 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1623 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1624
1625 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1626 wrapping help output.
1627
1628 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1629 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1630 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001631
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001632C API
1633-----
1634
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001635- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1636 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1637 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1638 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1639 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1640 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1641 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1642 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1643 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1644 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1645 its visible semantics have not changed.
1646
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001647- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1648 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1649
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001650Documentation
1651-------------
1652
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001653- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001654
1655 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001656 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001657
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001658 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001659
1660 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1661
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001662- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001663
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001664Tests
1665-----
1666
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001667- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001668 platforms that use the Makefile.
1669
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001670- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1671 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1672 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1673
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001674
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001675What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1676=================================
1677
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001678*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001679
1680Core and builtins
1681-----------------
1682
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001683- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1684 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1685 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1686 objects now (one object instead of three).
1687
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001688- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1689 Windows DLLs.
1690
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001691- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1692 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001693
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001694- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1695 a new .pyc magic.
1696
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001697- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1698 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1699 be there.
1700
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001701- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1702 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1703 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1704
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001705- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1706 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1707 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1708
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001709- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1710
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001711- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1712 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1713 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001714
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001715- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1716 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1717
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001718- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1719
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001720- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001721 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001722
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001723- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1724
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001725- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1726
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001727- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1728 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1729
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001730- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1731 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1732 Fixes bug #858016 .
1733
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001734- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1735 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1736 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1737
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001738- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1739 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1740 improves their performance (about 35%).
1741
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001742- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1743 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1744 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1745
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001746- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1747 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1748 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1749 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1750
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001751- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1752 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001753 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001754 length is not known).
1755
1756- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1757 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001758 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1759 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001760 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1761
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001762- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1763 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1764
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001765- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1766 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1767 keyword arguments.
1768
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001769- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1770 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1771 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1772
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001773- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1774 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1775 cases.
1776
1777- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1778 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1779 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1780 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1781 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1782 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1783 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1784 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1785 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1786 a release build.
1787
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001788- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1789 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1790
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001791- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001792 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001793
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001794- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1795 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1796 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1797 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1798 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1799 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1800 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1801 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1802 destroyed.
1803
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001804- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1805 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1806 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1807 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1808 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1809 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1810 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1811 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1812
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001813- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1814 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1815 character other than a space.
1816
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001817- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1818 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1819 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1820 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1821 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1822 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1823 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1824 attributes with the same name.
1825
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001826- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1827 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1828 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1829 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1830 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1831 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1832 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1833 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1834 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1835 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1836 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1837 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1838 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1839 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001840
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001841- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1842 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1843 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1844 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1845 This has been repaired.
1846
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001847- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1848
1849- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1850
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001851- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1852 over a sequence.
1853
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001854- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001855 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001856
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001857- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1858
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001859- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1860 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1861 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1862 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1863 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1864 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1865 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1866 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1867
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001868- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1869 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1870 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1871
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001872- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1873 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1874 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1875 freelist.
1876
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001877- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1878 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1879
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001880- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1881 number.
1882
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001883- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1884 a TypeError exception.
1885
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001886- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1887 820195.
1888
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001889- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1890 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1891 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1892
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001893- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001894 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1895 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001896
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001897- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1898 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1899 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1900
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001901- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1902 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001903 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001904
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001905- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001906 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1907 the first call.
1908
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001909
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001910Extension modules
1911-----------------
1912
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001913- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1914 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1915
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001916- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1917 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1918 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1919 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1920 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1921 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1922 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001923
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001924- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1925
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001926- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1927
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001928- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1929 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1930
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001931- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1932 fewer false positives.
1933
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001934- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1935 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1936
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001937- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001938 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1939
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001940- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001941 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001942 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001943 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1944 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001945
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001946- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1947 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1948 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1949 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1950
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001951- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1952 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1953 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1954 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1955 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1956 #897625.
1957
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001958- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1959 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1960
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001961- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1962 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1963 and pops on either side of the deque.
1964
1965- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1966 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1967
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001968- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1969 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1970 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1971 other functions that expect a function argument.
1972
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001973- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1974
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001975- os.getsid was added.
1976
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001977- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1978 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1979 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1980
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001981- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1982
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001983- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1984
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001985- readline.clear_history was added.
1986
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001987- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1988
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001989- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1990
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001991- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1992
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001993- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1994
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001995- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1996
1997- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1998
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001999- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2000
2001- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2002
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002003- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2004 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2005 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2006
2007- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2008 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2009 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2010 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2011 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2012 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2013 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2014
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002015- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2016 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2017 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2018 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002019
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002020- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002021 iterators from a single iterable.
2022
2023- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2024 of raising a TypeError exception.
2025
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002026- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2027 as parameter.
2028
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002029Library
2030-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002031
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002032- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2033 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2034 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2035 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2036
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002037- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2038
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002039- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2040 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2041 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002042
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002043- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2044 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2045 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002046
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002047- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002048
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002049- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2050 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002051
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002052- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2053 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2054
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002055- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2056
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002057- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002058 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002059
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002060- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002061 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002062
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002063- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2064
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002065- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2066 on cygwin and mingw32.
2067
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002068- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2069
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002070- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2071 module.
2072
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002073- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2074 installation scheme for all platforms.
2075
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002076- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002077 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002078
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002079- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2080 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2081 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2082
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002083- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2084 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2085 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2086
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002087- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2088
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002089- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2090
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002091- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2092 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2093
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002094- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2095 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2096 type pattern with the same value exists.
2097
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002098- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2099 when run from the command prompt).
2100
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002101- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2102 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2103
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002104- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2105 default sort).
2106
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002107- Added global runctx function to profile module
2108
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002109- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2110
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002111- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2112
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002113- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2114
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002115- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002116 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2117 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2118 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2119 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2120 accordingly.
2121
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002122- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2123 decoding standards.
2124
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002125- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2126 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2127 called for all requests.
2128
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002129- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2130 they are passed to the compiler.
2131
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002132- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2133 indent, width and depth.
2134
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002135- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2136 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2137
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002138- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2139 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2140
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002141- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2142
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002143- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2144
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002145- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2146
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002147- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2148 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2149
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002150- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002151 for better performance.
2152
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002153- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002154
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002155- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2156 a string).
2157
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002158- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2159
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002160- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2161
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002162- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2163
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002164- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2165
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002166- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2167 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2168 list of fieldnames.
2169
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002170- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2171 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2172
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002173- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2174
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002175- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2176 empty lists.
2177
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002178- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2179 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2180 and shelves.
2181
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002182- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2183 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2184
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002185- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002186 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2187 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002188
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002189- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2190 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002191 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002192
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002193- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002194 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2195 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2196
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002197- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2198 and removed in Py2.4.
2199
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002200- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2201
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002202- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2203
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002204Tools/Demos
2205-----------
2206
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002207- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2208 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2209
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002210- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2211
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002212- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2213 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2214 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2215 destination in situations where both files are given.
2216
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002217- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2218 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2219 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2220 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2221
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002222- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2223
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002224- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2225 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2226 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2227 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2228 now.
2229
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002230- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2231 in effect
2232
2233- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2234 C-c C-h
2235
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002236- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2237 -d option was given.
2238
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002239Build
2240-----
2241
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002242- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2243 build under OS X.
2244
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002245- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2246 --enable-profiling.
2247
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002248- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2249 is configured --with-tsc.
2250
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002251- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2252 on AMD64.
2253
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002254- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2255 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2256
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002257- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2258 removed.
2259
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002260- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2261 supported (see PEP 11).
2262
2263- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2264
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002265- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2266
2267- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2268 (see PEP 11).
2269
2270- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2271 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2272
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002273C API
2274-----
2275
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002276- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2277 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2278 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2279
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002280- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2281 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2282 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2283 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2284
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002285- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2286 generator objects.
2287
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002288- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2289 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002290 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2291 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002292
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002293- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2294 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2295
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002296- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2297 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2298 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2299 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2300 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2301
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002302- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2303 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2304 about 10% faster.
2305
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002306- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2307 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2308
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002309- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2310 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2311 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2312 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2313
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002314Windows
2315-------
2316
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002317- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2318 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2319 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2320 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2321
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002322- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2323 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2324 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2325
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002326
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002327What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2328===============================
2329
2330*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2331
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002332IDLE
2333----
2334
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002335- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2336 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2337 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2338 context-menu actions.
2339
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002340- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2341 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2342 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2343 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2344 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2345 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2346 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2347 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2348 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2349
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002350
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002351What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2352=============================================
2353
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002354*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002355
2356Core and builtins
2357-----------------
2358
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002359- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002360 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002361 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2362
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002363Extension modules
2364-----------------
2365
2366- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2367 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2368 than once. This has been fixed.
2369
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002370- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2371 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2372 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2373 call.
2374
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002375- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2376
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002377Library
2378-------
2379
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002380- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2381 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2382
2383- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2384 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2385 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2386 restored.
2387
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002388IDLE
2389----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002390
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002391- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002392
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002393Build
2394-----
2395
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002396- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2397 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2398
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002399C API
2400-----
2401
2402Windows
2403-------
2404
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002405- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2406 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2407
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002408- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2409
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002410Mac
2411---
2412
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002413- Various fixes to pimp.
2414
2415- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2416
2417- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2418 more problems than it solves.
2419
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002420
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002421What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2422=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002423
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002424*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2425
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002426Core and builtins
2427-----------------
2428
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002429- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2430 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2431
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002432- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2433 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002434 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002435
2436- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2437 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2438 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002439 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002440
2441- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2442 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002443
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002444- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2445 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2446 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2447
2448- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002449 770247.
2450
2451- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002452
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002453Extension modules
2454-----------------
2455
2456- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2457 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2458
2459- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2460
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002461- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2462
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002463- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2464 contained within the _strptime module.
2465
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002466- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2467 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2468
2469- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002470 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2471
2472- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2473 the find_class attribute, if present.
2474
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002475- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002476
2477 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2478 (SF bug 763298).
2479
2480 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002481 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2482 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2483 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002484
2485 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2486
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002487Library
2488-------
2489
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002490- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2491
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002492- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2493 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2494 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2495 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2496 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2497 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2498 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2499 or Tester().
2500
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002501- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2502 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2503 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2504 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2505 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2506 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2507 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2508 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2509 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002510
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002511 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002512
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002513- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2514 weren't before was an oversight.
2515
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002516- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2517 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2518
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002519- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2520 when there are no lines.
2521
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002522- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2523 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2524
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002525- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2526 to child processes.
2527
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002528- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2529
2530- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2531
2532- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2533 xmlrpclib.
2534
2535- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2536 responses.
2537
2538- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2539 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2540
2541- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2542 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2543 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2544
2545- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2546 used as patterns.
2547
2548- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2549 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2550 than Tk 8.3.
2551
2552- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2553
2554- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002555
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002556Tools/Demos
2557-----------
2558
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002559- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2560
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002561- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2562
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002563- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002564
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002565Build
2566-----
2567
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002568- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2569
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002570- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2571
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002572- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2573 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002574
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002575- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2576 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2577 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002578
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002579C API
2580-----
2581
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002582- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2583 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2584
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002585Windows
2586-------
2587
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002588- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2589 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2590 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2591 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2592 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2593 Python exception ::
2594
2595 thread.error: can't start new thread
2596
2597 is raised now.
2598
2599- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2600 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2601 instead of from DLL teardown.
2602
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002603Mac
2604---
2605
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002606- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002607 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002608 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2609 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2610 the executable in the bundle.
2611
2612- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002613
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002614- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2615
2616- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2617 on Panther.
2618
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002619What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2620================================
2621
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002622*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002623
2624Core and builtins
2625-----------------
2626
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002627- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2628 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2629 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2630 with the -i option.
2631
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002632- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2633 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2634
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002635- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2636 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2637
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002638- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2639 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2640 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2641 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2642 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2643 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2644 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2645 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2646 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2647 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2648 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2649 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2650 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002651
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002652- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2653 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2654 embedded in a lambda expression.
2655
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002656- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2657 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2658 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2659 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2660 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2661
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002662- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2663 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2664 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2665
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002666- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2667 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2668
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002669- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2670 It's writable again.
2671
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002672- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2673 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2674 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002675 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002676
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002677- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2678 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2679 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2680
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002681Extension modules
2682-----------------
2683
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002684- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2685 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2686
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002687- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2688 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2689 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2690 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2691
2692- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2693 collection.
2694
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002695- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2696 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2697 unique within a single program run.
2698
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002699- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2700 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2701
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002702- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2703 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2704
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002705- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2706 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002707
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002708- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2709
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002710- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2711 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2712
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002713- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2714 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2715 for many BSD-derived systems.
2716
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002717
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002718Library
2719-------
2720
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002721- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2722 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2723 primary ones:
2724
2725 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2726 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2727 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2728
2729 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2730 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2731 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2732 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2733 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2734 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2735
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002736- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2737 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2738 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2739 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2740 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2741 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2742 argument.
2743
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002744- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2745 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2746 in the archive.
2747
2748- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2749 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2750
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002751- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2752 569574).
2753
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002754- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2755 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2756 no more.
2757
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002758- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2759 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2760 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2761 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2762 code coverage.
2763
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002764- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2765 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2766 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002767 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2768 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002769
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002770- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2771 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2772 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002773 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002774
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002775- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2776
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002777- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2778 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2779 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2780 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2781
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002782- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2783 handling.
2784
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002785- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2786 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2787
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002788- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2789 in socket.py.
2790
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002791- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2792
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002793- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2794 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2795 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2796 opener with proxy support.
2797
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002798- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2799
2800- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2801
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002802Tools/Demos
2803-----------
2804
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002805- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2806
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002807- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2808
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002809- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2810 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002811
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002812- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2813 files.
2814
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002815Build
2816-----
2817
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002818- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002819 different root directory.
2820
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002821C API
2822-----
2823
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002824- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2825 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2826 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2827 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2828 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2829 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2830 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2831 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2832 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2833 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2834
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002835- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2836 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2837 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2838 from Python.
2839
2840
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002841New platforms
2842-------------
2843
2844None this time.
2845
2846Tests
2847-----
2848
2849- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2850 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2851
2852Windows
2853-------
2854
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002855- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2856
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002857- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2858 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2859 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2860 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2861 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2862 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2863 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2864 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2865 that's what it's for.
2866
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002867Mac
2868---
2869
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002870- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2871 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2872 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2873 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002874- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2875 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2876- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002877
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002878SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2879------------------------------------
2880
2881430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2882598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2883622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2884661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2885683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2886697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2887713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2888724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2889727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2890729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2891730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2892731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2893732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2894733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2895735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2896740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2897744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2898745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2899747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2900749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2901751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2902753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2903755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2904757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2905760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2906
2907
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002908What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2909================================
2910
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002911*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002912
2913Core and builtins
2914-----------------
2915
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002916- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2917 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2918
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002919- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2920 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2921 and cannot be strings).
2922
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002923- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2924 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2925 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2926 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2927
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002928- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2929 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2930 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2931 Python itself.
2932
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002933- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2934 the referenced object, if it has one.
2935
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002936- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2937 the thread started at
2938 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2939
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002940- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2941 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2942 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2943 placed on a list index.
2944
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002945- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2946 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2947 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2948 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2949
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002950- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2951 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2952 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2953 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2954 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2955 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2956 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2957
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002958- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2959 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2960 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2961 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2962 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2963
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002964- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2965 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002966
2967- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2968 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2969 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2970 #693195.)
2971
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002972- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2973 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002974
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002975- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002976 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002977 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2978 interpreter executions, would fail.
2979
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002980- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002981 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002982 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002983
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002984Extension modules
2985-----------------
2986
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002987- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2988 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2989 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2990 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2991
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002992- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2993 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2994
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002995- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2996 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2997 and Greg Chapman.)
2998
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002999- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3000 recursively.
3001
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003002- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003003 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3004 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3005 leaks.
3006
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003007- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3008
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003009- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3010 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3011 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3012 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3013 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3014 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3015 #705836.
3016
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003017- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003018 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3019
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003020- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3021 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3022 See SF bug #692416.
3023
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003024- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3025 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3026
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003027- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3028 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3029 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003030
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003031- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003032 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3033 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3034
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003035- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3036 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3037 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3038 timeouts to work properly.
3039
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003040Library
3041-------
3042
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003043- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3044 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3045 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3046 future release.
3047
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003048- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3049 for querying platform dependent features.
3050
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003051- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003052
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003053- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3054 pickle protocol versions.
3055
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003056- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3057 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3058 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3059
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003060- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3061
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003062- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3063 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3064 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3065 modules.
3066
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003067- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3068 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3069 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3070
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003071- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3072 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3073
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003074- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3075 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3076 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3077
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003078- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003079 MS Office extensions.
3080
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003081- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3082 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3083
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003084- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3085 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3086
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003087- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3088 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3089 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3090 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3091 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3092 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3093
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003094- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3095 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3096 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003097
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003098- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3099 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3100 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3101
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003102- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3103
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003104- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3105 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3106 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3107
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003108Tools/Demos
3109-----------
3110
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003111- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3112 See the module docstring for details.
3113
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003114Build
3115-----
3116
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003117- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3118 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003119
3120C API
3121-----
3122
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003123- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3124
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003125- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3126 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3127 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3128
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003129- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3130 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003131
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003132 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3133 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3134 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003135
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003136- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003137 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3138
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003139- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3140 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3141 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003142
3143New platforms
3144-------------
3145
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003146None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003147
3148Tests
3149-----
3150
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003151- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3152 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003153
3154Windows
3155-------
3156
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003157- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3158 function.
3159
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003160- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3161 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003162
3163Mac
3164---
3165
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003166- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3167 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003168
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003169- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3170 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003171
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003172- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3173 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3174 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003175
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003176- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003177 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3178 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003179
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003180- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3181 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003182
3183
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003184What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3185=================================
3186
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003187*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003188
3189Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003190-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003191
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003192- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3193 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3194 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3195
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003196- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3197 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3198 (SF patch #664376.)
3199
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003200- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3201 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3202 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3203 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3204 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3205 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003206 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003207
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003208- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3209 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3210 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3211 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003212 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003213
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003214- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3215 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3216 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3217 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3218 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3219 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3220 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3221 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3222 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3223 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3224 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3225
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003226- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3227 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3228 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3229 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3230 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3231 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3232
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003233- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3234 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3235
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003236- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3237 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3238 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3239 case.)
3240
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003241- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3242 passed as unicode strings.
3243
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003244- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3245 See SF bug #683467.
3246
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003247- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3248 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3249
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003250- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3251
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003252- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3253
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003254- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3255 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3256 arguments.
3257
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003258- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3259 See SF bug #667147.
3260
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003261- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003262 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003263 See SF bug #676155.
3264
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003265- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003266 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003267 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3268 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3269 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3270 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3271 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3272 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003273
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003274Extension modules
3275-----------------
3276
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003277- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3278 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3279 tp_as_number pointer.
3280
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003281- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3282 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3283 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3284 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3285 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3286
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003287- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3288
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003289- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3290
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003291- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003292 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003293 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3294 patch #678531.)
3295
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003296- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3297 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3298
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003299- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3300 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3301
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003302- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3303
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003304- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3305 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3306 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3307
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003308- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3309
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003310- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3311 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3312
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003313- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003314
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003315- datetime changes:
3316
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003317 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3318
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003319 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3320 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3321 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3322 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3323 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3324 now.
3325
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003326 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003327 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3328 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003329
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003330 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003331 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003332 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3333 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3334 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3335 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003336
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003337 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3338 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3339 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003340 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3341
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003342 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3343 by a later example coded by Guido.
3344
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003345 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003346 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3347 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3348 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003349 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3350 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3351
3352 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3353 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3354 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3355 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3356 tzinfo subclass instance.
3357
3358 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3359 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3360 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3361 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3362 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3363 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3364 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3365 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003366
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003367 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3368 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3369 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3370 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3371 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003372 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3373
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003374 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003375
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003376 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3377 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3378 as a naive datetime object.
3379
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003380 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3381 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3382 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3383
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003384 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3385 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3386 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3387 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3388 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3389 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3390 comparison.
3391
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003392 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3393 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3394 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3395 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003396 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003397
3398 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003399
3400 and ::
3401
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003402 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3403
3404 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3405 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3406 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3407 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3408
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003409 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3410 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3411 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3412 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3413 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3414
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003415 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3416 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003417 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3418 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003419
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003420Library
3421-------
3422
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003423- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3424 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3425
3426- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3427 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3428 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3429 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3430 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3431 See PEP 307 for details.
3432
3433- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3434 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3435
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003436- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3437 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003438 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003439 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3440 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003441 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003442
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003443- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3444 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3445
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003446- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3447 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3448 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3449
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003450- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3451
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003452- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3453 exception.
3454
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003455- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3456 class.
3457
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003458- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3459 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3460 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3461
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003462- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3463 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3464
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003465- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003466 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3467 See SF bug #659228.
3468
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003469- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3470 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3471 See SF patch #651082.
3472
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003473- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003474
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003475- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3476 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3477
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003478- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003479 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003480
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003481- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3482 DOS paths from other platforms.
3483
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003484Tools/Demos
3485-----------
3486
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003487- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3488 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3489 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3490 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3491 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3492 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3493 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3494 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3495 example:
3496
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003497 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3498 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003499
3500 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3501
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003502
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003503Build
3504-----
3505
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003506- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3507 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3508 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003509 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3510
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003511 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3512
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003513- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3514 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3515 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3516 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3517 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3518 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3519 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3520 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3521 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3522
3523- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3524 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3525 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3526 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3527
3528- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3529 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3530
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003531C API
3532-----
3533
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003534- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3535 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003536
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003537- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3538 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3539 tp_as_number pointer.
3540
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003541- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3542 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3543 (SF #681367)
3544
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003545- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3546 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3547 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3548 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003549
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003550Tests
3551-----
3552
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003553- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003554 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3555 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3556 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3557 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3558 pydoc.)
3559
3560- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3561
3562- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003563
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003564Windows
3565-------
3566
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003567- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3568 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3569 time).
3570
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003571- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3572 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3573
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003574- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3575 release without strong cryptography.
3576
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003577- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003578 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003579
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003580- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3581 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3582
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003583Mac
3584---
3585
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003586- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3587 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003588
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003589- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3590 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3591 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003592
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003593- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3594 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003595
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003596- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3597 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3598 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3599 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003600
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003601- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003602 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3603 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3604 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003605
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003606
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003607What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003608=================================
3609
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003610*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003611
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003612Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003613--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003614
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003615- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3616
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003617- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3618 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003619 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003620 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003621 a different meaning than before.
3622
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003623- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003624 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003625 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003626
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003627- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003628 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003629 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003630
3631- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3632 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3633 and deallocation.
3634
3635- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3636 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3637
3638- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3639 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3640 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3641 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3642 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3643
3644- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3645 now detected by the garbage collector.
3646
3647- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3648 [SF bug 519621]
3649
3650- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3651 identifier.
3652
3653- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3654 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3655 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3656 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3657 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3658 [SF bug 563060]
3659
3660- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3661 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3662 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3663 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3664 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3665
3666- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3667 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3668 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3669
3670- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3671
3672- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3673 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3674 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3675 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3676 state of the slots would be lost.)
3677
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003678Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003679-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003680
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003681- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003682 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3683 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3684 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3685 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003686 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3687 Jython 2.1.
3688
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003689- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003690 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003691 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3692 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3693 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3694 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3695 these, see PEP 302.
3696
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003697- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3698 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3699 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3700
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003701- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3702 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3703 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3704
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003705- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3706 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3707 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3708
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003709- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3710 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3711 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3712 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3713 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3714 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3715 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3716 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3717 releases or implementations.
3718
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003719- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003720 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3721 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003722
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003723- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3724 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3725
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003726- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3727 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3728 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3729
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003730- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3731 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3732
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003733- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3734 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003735 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3736 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003737
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003738- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3739 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3740 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3741 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3742 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3743
3744 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3745 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3746 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3747 pattern.
3748
3749 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3750 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3751 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3752 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3753
3754 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3755 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3756 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3757 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3758 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3759 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3760
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003761- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3762 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3763 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3764 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3765 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3766 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3767 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3768 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003769
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003770- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3771 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3772 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3773 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3774 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003775 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3776 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3777 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3778 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3779 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3780 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3781 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003782
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003783- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3784 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3785
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003786- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3787 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3788 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3789 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3790 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3791 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3792 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3793 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3794 to Zack Weinberg!
3795
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003796- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3797 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3798 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3799 type. This has been fixed now.
3800
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003801- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3802 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3803 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3804
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003805- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3806 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3807 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3808 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3809 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3810 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3811 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3812 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003813 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003814
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003815- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3816 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3817 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003818
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003819- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3820 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3821 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3822 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3823 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3824 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3825 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3826 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003827 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003828 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3829 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3830
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003831- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3832 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3833 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3834 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3835 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3836 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3837 this.)
3838
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003839- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3840 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003841 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003842 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003843 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3844 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003845 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3846 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003847
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003848- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3849 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3850 currently running.
3851
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003852- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3853 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3854 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3855 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3856
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003857- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3858 as directory names.
3859
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003860- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3861 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3862
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003863- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3864 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3865
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003866- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003867 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3868 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003869
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003870- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3871 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3872 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3873 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3874 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3875
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003876- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3877 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3878 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3879 removed.
3880
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003881- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3882 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3883 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3884
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003885- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3886 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3887 to __debug__.
3888
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003889- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3890 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3891 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3892
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003893- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3894 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3895 deprecated now.
3896
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003897- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3898 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3899 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003900
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003901- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3902 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3903 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3904 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3905 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003906
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003907- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3908 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3909
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003910- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3911 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3912 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003913 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003914 is backward compatible.
3915
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003916- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3917 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3918 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3919 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3920 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3921
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003922- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3923 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3924 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3925 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3926 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3927 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003928
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003929- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3930 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3931
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003932- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3933 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3934
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003935- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3936 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3937 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3938 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3939 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3940
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003941- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3942 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3943 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3944
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003945- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003946 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3947
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003948- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3949 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3950 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003951
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003952- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3953 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3954
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003955- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3956 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3957 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3958
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003959- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3960
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003961Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003962-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003963
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003964- Added three operators to the operator module:
3965 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3966 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3967 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3968
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003969- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3970
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003971- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3972 archives.
3973
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003974- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3975 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3976 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3977
3978 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3979
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003980- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3981 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3982 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003983 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003984
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003985- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3986 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3987 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3988 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003989 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3990 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3991 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3992 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003993
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003994- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3995 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003996
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003997- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3998
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003999- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4000 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4001
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004002- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4003 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4004 supported.
4005
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004006- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4007
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004008- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4009 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004010
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004011- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4012 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4013
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004014- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4015
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004016- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4017 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4018
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004019- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4020 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4021 functions but callable type objects.
4022
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004023- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004024 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004025 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004026
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004027- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4028 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004029
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004030- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4031 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004032
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004033- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4034 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4035 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4036 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4037
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004038- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4039 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004040
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004041- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4042 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4043 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4044 and __imul__.
4045
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004046- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004047 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4048 is called.
4049
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004050- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4051 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4052 interpreter was compiled.
4053
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004054- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4055 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4056 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004057 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004058 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4059 1, not 2.
4060
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004061- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4062 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4063 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4064 limit.
4065
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004066- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4067 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4068 bug #623464.
4069
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004070- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4071 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4072 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4073 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4074
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004075Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004076-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004077
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004078- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4079
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004080- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4081 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4082 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4083 with Python 2.3a2.
4084
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004085- os.path exposes getctime.
4086
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004087- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004088 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004089 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004090 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004091 unit tests of floating point results.
4092
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004093- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4094 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4095 has been increased.
4096
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004097- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4098 executed.
4099
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004100- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4101 postinstallation script.
4102
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004103- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4104 test the current module.
4105
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004106- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004107 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4108 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4109 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4110 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4111
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004112- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004113 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004114 Ward's Optik package.
4115
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004116- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4117 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4118 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4119 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4120
4121- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4122 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004123 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004124
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004125- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4126 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4127 shelf are binary pickles.
4128
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004129- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4130 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4131
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004132- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4133 modules are iterators now.
4134
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004135- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4136 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4137 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4138 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4139 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4140 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004141
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004142- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4143 with their entity value.
4144
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004145- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4146
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004147- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4148 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004149
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004150- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4151 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004152 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004153
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004154- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4155 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4156 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4157 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4158 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4159 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4160 main():
4161
4162 import locale
4163 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4164
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004165- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4166 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4167
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004168- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4169 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4170 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4171 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4172 to the new standard.
4173
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004174- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4175 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4176 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4177 an extension to the database.
4178
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004179- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4180 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4181 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4182 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004183 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004184
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004185- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004186 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004187
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004188- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4189 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4190 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4191 bounded integers.
4192
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004193- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4194 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4195 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4196 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4197 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4198 in existence.
4199
4200 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4201 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4202 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4203 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4204 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4205 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4206
4207 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4208 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4209 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4210 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4211
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004212- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4213 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4214 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4215
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004216- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4217
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004218- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4219 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4220 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4221 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4222
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004223- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4224 argument.
4225
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004226- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4227 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4228 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4229 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4230 [SF patch 560794].
4231
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004232- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4233 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4234 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004235 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4236 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4237 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004238
4239- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4240 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004241
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004242- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4243 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4244 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4245 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004246
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004247- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4248 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4249 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4250 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4251 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4252
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004253- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004254
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004255- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4256
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004257- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4258 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4259 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4260 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4261 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4262 identical to None.
4263
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004264- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4265 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4266 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4267 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4268 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4269 results now.
4270
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004271- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4272 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4273
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004274- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4275 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4276 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4277 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4278 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4279 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4280 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4281 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4282
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004283- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4284
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004285- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4286 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4287
4288- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4289 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4290 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4291 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4292 and other systems.
4293
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004294- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4295 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4296 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4297 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 +00004298 work well with these.
4299
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004300- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4301
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004302- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004303 connections.
4304
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004305- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4306 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4307 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4308
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004309- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4310 sets
4311
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004312- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4313 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4314 name.
4315
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004316- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4317 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4318 passed in.
4319
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004320- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004321 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004322 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4323 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004324
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004325- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4326
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004327- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4328
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004329- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4330 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4331 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4332
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004333- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4334 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4335 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4336 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004337 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004338
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004339- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004340 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004341 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004342
4343- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4344 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4345 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4346
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004347- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004348 the value of its expression argument.
4349
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004350- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4351 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4352 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4353
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004354- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4355 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4356 skipstone browser was included.
4357
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004358- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4359 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4360
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004361Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004362-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004363
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004364- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4365 names in addition to accepting file names.
4366
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004367- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4368 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4369 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4370 still used and useful.)
4371
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004372- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4373 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4374 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4375 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004376
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004377- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4378 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4379 the generated binary.
4380
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004381Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004382-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004383
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004384- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4385
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004386- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4387 except in the hands of experts.
4388
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004389- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004390 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4391 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4392 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004393
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004394- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4395 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4396 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4397 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4398 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4399 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4400 builds.
4401
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004402- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4403 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4404 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4405 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4406 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4407 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4408 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4409 new type.
4410
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004411- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004412
4413 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4414 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4415 positive infinities.
4416
4417 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4418 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4419 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4420 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4421 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4422 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4423 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4424
4425 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4426
4427 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4428
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004429- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4430 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4431 size of the executable.
4432
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004433- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4434 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4435 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4436 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004437
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004438- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4439
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004440- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4441 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4442 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004443
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004444- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4445 well as Unix.
4446
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004447- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4448 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4449 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4450 modules in the README file for details.
4451
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004452C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004453-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004454
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004455- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4456 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004457 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004458 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004459 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004460
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004461- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4462 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4463 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4464 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4465 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4466 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004467 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004468 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4469 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4470 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4471 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4472 aligned.)
4473
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004474- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4475 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4476 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4477
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004478- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4479 level.
4480
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004481- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4482 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4483 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4484 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4485 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4486
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004487- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4488 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4489 code.
4490
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004491- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4492 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4493 adjusting for negative indices.
4494
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004495- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4496 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4497 object.
4498
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004499- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4500 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4501 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4502
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004503- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4504 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004505
4506- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4507
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004508- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4509 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4510 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4511 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4512
4513- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4514
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004515- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004516
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004517- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004518 without going through the buffer API.
4519
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004520- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004521
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004522- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4523 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4524 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4525 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4526
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004527- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4528 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4529
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004530- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004531 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4532
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004533New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004534-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004535
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004536- OpenVMS is now supported.
4537
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004538- AtheOS is now supported.
4539
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004540- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4541
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004542- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4543
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004544Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004545-----
4546
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004547- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4548 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4549 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004550
4551Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004552-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004553
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004554- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4555 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4556 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4557 bugs.
4558 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004559 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004560 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4561 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004562 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004563
4564- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004565 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004566
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004567- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4568 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4569
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004570- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4571 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004572 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004573 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4574
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004575- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4576 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4577 use files" uninstall option).
4578
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004579- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4580
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004581- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4582 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4583
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004584- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4585 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4586 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4587
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004588- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4589 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4590 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4591 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4592 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004593 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4594 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4595 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004596
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004597- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004598 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004599 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4600 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4601 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4602 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4603 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4604 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4605 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4606 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4607 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4608 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4609 work around.
4610
4611- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4612 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4613 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4614 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4615 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4616 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4617 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4618 specified with O_CREAT too).
4619
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004620Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004621----
4622
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004623- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004624
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004625- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4626 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4627 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4628
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004629- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4630 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4631 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4632
4633- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4634 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4635 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4636 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4637 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4638 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4639 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4640 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004641
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004642- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4643 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4644 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004645
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004646- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4647 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4648 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4649 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4650 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004651
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004652- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4653 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4654 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004655
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004656- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4657 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004658
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004659- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4660 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4661 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4662 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4663 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004664
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004665- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4666 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4667 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4668
4669- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4670 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4671 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004672
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004673- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4674 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4675 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4676 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004677 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004678
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004679- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4680 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004681
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004682- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4683 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004684
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004685- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004686 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004687 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4688 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004689
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004690
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004691What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004692===============================
4693
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004694*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4695
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004696Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004697--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004698
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004699- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4700 with a custom metaclass.
4701
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004702Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004703-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004704
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004705- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4706 are proxies.
4707
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004708Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004709-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004710
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004711- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4712 very short strings.
4713
4714- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4715 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4716 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4717 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4718 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4719
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004720Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004721-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004722
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004723- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4724 close or delete time).
4725
4726- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4727 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4728
4729- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4730
4731- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004732 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004733
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004734Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004735-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004736
4737Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004738-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004739
4740C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004741-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004742
4743New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004744-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004745
4746Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004747-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004748
4749Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004751
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004752- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4753
4754- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4755 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4756
4757- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4758 deleted at process exit time.
4759
4760- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4761 in backslash.
4762
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004763Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004764----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004765
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004766- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4767 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4768 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4769
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004770
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004771What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004772===========================
4773
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004774*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4775
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004776Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004777--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004778
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004779- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4780 been extensively updated. See
4781
4782 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4783
4784 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4785
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004786- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4787 deleted!
4788
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004789- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4790 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4791 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4792 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4793 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4794
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004795- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4796
4797 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4798 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4799
4800 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4801 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4802 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4803 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4804 supported anyway.
4805
4806 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4807 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4808
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004809- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4810 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4811 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4812 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4813 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004814
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004815- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4816 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4817 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4818
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004819Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004820-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004821
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004822- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4823 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4824 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4825 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4826 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4827 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004828 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4829 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4830 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4831 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004832
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004833- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4834 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4835 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4836
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004837Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004838-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004839
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004840- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4841
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004842Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004843-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004844
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004845- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4846 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4847 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4848 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4849 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4850 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4851
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004852- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4853
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004854- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4855
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004856- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4857
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004858- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4859 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4860 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4861
4862- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4863
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004864Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004866
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004867- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4868 off a search on Google.
4869
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004870Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004871-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004872
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004873- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4874 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4875 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4876 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4877 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4878 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4879 other platforms should do likewise.
4880
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004881- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4882 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4883 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4884
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004885C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004886-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004887
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004888- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4889 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4890 producing key-value pairs.
4891
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004892- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004893 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004894 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4895 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4896 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4897 previously went unchallenged.
4898
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004899New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004900-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004901
4902Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004903-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004904
4905Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004906-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004907
4908Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004909----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004910
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004911- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4912 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004913
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004914- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4915 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4916 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4917 home.
4918
4919
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004920What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004921===========================
4922
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004923*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4924
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004925Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004926--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004927
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004928- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4929 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004930
4931 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004932 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004933
4934 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4935 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004936 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004937 This needs to be documented.
4938
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004939- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4940 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4941
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004942- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4943 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4944 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4945
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004946- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4947 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4948
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004949- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4950 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4951 class forbids it).
4952
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004953- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4954 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4955 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4956
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004957- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4958
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004959Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004960-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004961
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004962- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4963 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004964 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004965
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004966- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4967 (like 1 + '').
4968
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004969Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004970-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004971
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004972- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4973 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4974 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4975 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004976 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004977 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4978
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004979- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4980 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4981 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4982 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4983
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004984- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4985 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004986 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4987 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4988 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004989
4990- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4991 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004992
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004993- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4994 bytes on its input.
4995
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004996Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004997-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004998
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004999- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005000 convenience function.
5001
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005002- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5003 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5004 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005005 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5006 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5007 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5008 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5009 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5010 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005011
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005012- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5013 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5014 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5015 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5016
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005017- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5018 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5019 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5020
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005021- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5022 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5023 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5024 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5025
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005026- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5027 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005028 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005029 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5030 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5031 new -l and -e options.
5032
5033- statcache is now deprecated.
5034
5035- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5036 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005037 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005038 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5039 time properly taken into account.
5040
5041- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5042 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5043 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5044 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5045
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005046Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005047-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005048
5049Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005050-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005051
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005052- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5053 is built with libdb3 if available.
5054
5055- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5056
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005057C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005058-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005059
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005060- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5061 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5062 PySequence_Size().
5063
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005064- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5065
5066- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5067 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5068 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5069
5070- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5071 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5072
5073- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5074 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5075
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005076New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005077-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005078
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005079- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5080 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5081
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005082- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5083 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5084
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005085- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5086
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005087Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005088-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005089
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005090- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5091 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5092
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005093Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005094-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005095
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005096Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005097----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005098
5099- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5100 removed completely in the next release.
5101
5102- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5103 OSX.
5104
5105- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5106 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5107
5108- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5109
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005110
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005111What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005112===========================
5113
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005114*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5115
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005116Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005117--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005118
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005119- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005120 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005121 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005122 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5123 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005124 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5125 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005126 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5127 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005128
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005129- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5130 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5131
5132- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5133 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5134
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005135Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005136-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005137
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005138- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5139 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5140 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5141 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5142 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5143 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5144 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5145 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5146
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005147- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5148 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5149 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5150 example).
5151
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005152- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005153 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005154 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005155 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005156
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005157- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5158 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5159 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005160 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005161
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005162- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5163 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5164 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5165 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5166 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5167 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5168
5169 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5170
5171 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5172
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005173Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005174-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005175
5176- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5177
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005178- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5179
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005180- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5181 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005182
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005183- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5184 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5185 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5186 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5187 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5188 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005189 attributes.
5190
5191- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5192 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5193 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005194
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005195- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5196 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5197 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005198
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005199- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5200 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5201 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005202 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5203 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5204
5205- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5206 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005207
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005208Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005209-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005210
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005211- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5212 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5213
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005214- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5215 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5216 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5217 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5218
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005219- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5220 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5221 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5222 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5223
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005224 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5225 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5226 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5227 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5228 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5229 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5230 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5231 without losing information).
5232
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005233- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005234 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5235 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5236 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5237 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5238 module).
5239
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005240 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005241 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5242 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5243 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5244 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005245
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005246- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005247 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5248 encoding.
5249
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005250- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5251 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5252
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005253- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005254 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5255
5256- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5257 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5258 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5259 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5260
5261- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5262
5263- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5264 ON, and OFF.
5265
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005266- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5267 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5268
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005269Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005270-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005271
5272- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5273 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5274 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005275
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005276- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5277 been added: -X and -E.
5278
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005279Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005280-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005281
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005282- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5283 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5284
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005285C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005286-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005287
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005288- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5289 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5290 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5291 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5292 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5293
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005294- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5295 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5296 as long) arguments.
5297
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005298- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5299 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5300 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5301 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5302 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5303 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5304
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005305- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5306 input.
5307
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005308New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005309-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005310
5311Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005312-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005313
5314Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005315-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005316
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005317- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5318 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5319 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5320
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005321- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5322 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5323 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005324 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005325
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005326 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5327 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5328 import signal
5329 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005330
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005331 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005332 while 1:
5333 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005334 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005335 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5336 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5337 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5338 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005339
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005340
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005341What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5342===========================
5343
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005344*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5345
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005346Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005347--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005348
5349- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5350 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5351 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5352
5353- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5354 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5355 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5356 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5357 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5358 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5359 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005360
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005361- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005362 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005363 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5364 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5365 associate a docstring with a property.
5366
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005367- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5368 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5369 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5370 other built-in object types.
5371
5372- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5373 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5374 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5375 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5376 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5377
5378- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5379 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5380
5381- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5382 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005383 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005384 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5385 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5386 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5387 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5388 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5389
5390- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5391 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5392 class.
5393
5394- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5395 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5396 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5397 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5398
5399- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5400 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5401 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5402 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5403
5404- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5405 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5406
5407- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5408 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5409 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5410 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5411 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005412 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005413 with the same value as s.
5414
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005415- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5416
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005417Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005418----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005419
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005420- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5421
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005422- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5423 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5424 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5425 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5426 objects.
5427
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005428- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5429 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005430 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5431 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5432
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005433- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5434 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5435 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5436
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005437Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005438-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005439
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005440- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5441 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5442 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5443 by the instances.
5444
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005445- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5446 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5447 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5448
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005449- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5450 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5451 before the entire comparison is complete.
5452
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005453- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5454 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5455 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5456
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005457- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5458 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5459 getwriter().
5460
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005461- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5462 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5463
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005464- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005465 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5466 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5467
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005468- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5469 iterable object.
5470
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005471- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5472 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005473
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005474- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5475 authentication.
5476
5477- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5478 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005479
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005480- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005481 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5482 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5483 a sample driver.)
5484
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005485Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005486-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005487
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005488- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5489 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5490 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5491 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5492 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5493 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5494 kernel has large file support.
5495
5496- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5497 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5498 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5499 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5500 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5501
5502- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5503 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5504 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5505
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005506C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005507-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005508
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005509- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5510 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5511
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005512New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005513-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005514
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005515- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5516 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5517
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005518Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005519-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005520
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005521- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5522 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5523 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5524 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5525 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5526
5527- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5528 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5529 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5530 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5531
5532- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5533 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5534
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005535Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005536-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005537
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005538- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005539 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5540 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005541
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005542
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005543What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5544===========================
5545
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005546*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5547
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005548Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005549----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005550
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005551- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5552 big to represent as a C double.
5553
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005554- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5555 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5556 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5557 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5558 restriction).
5559
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005560- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5561 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5562 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5563 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5564 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5565
5566 >>> dir([])
5567 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5568 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5569 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5570 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5571 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5572 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5573 'reverse', 'sort']
5574
5575 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5576
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005577- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005578 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5579 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5580 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5581 OverflowError exception.
5582
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005583- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005584 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005585 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5586 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5587 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5588 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5589 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005590 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005591 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5592 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5593
5594 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5595 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5596 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5597 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005598
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005599- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005600 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5601 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5602 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5603 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5604 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5605 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5606 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5607 once it is created.
5608
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005609- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5610 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5611 (key, value) pairs.
5612
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005613- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005614 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5615 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5616
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005617- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5618 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5619 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5620 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5621 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005622
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005623- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005624 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5625 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5626
5627 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5628
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005629- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005630 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5631
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005632Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005633-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005634
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005635- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005636 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5637 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005638
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005639- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5640 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5641 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5642 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5643 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5644 in this area anymore).
5645
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005646- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5647 threading.Timer.
5648
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005649- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5650 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5651
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005652- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005653 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5654
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005655- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005656 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5657 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5658 converted to Python longs.
5659
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005660- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005661 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5662
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005663- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5664 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5665 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5666
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005667Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005668-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005669
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005670- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5671 division operators as per PEP 238.
5672
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005673Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005674-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005675
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005676- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5677 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5678 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5679 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5680
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005681C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005682-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005683
5684- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005685
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005686- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5687 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005688 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005689
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005690 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5691 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005692 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005693 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005694
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005695- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005696 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5697 module:
5698
5699 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005700
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005701 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5702 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005703
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005704 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5705 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005706
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005707 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5708
5709 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5710
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005711- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005712 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5713 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5714 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005715
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005716New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005717-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005718
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005719- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5720 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5721 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5722 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5723 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005724
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005725Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005726-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005727
5728Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005729-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005730
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005731- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5732 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5733 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5734 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005735 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5736 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5737 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5738 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5739 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005740
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005741- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005742 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5743
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005744
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005745What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5746===========================
5747
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005748*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5749
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005750Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005751-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005752
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005753- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5754 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5755
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005756- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5757 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5758 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005759
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005760- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5761 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5762 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5763 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005764
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005765- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5766
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005767- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005768
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005769Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005770-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005771
5772- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005773 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005774 the module docstring for details.
5775
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005776Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005777-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005778
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005779- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005780 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5781 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5782 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005783
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005784- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5785 Nick Mathewson.
5786
5787Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005788----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005789
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005790- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5791 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5792 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5793 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5794 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5795 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5796 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5797 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5798
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005799- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5800 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5801 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5802 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5803
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005804- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5805 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5806 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5807 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5808 come a long way).
5809
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005810- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5811 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5812 write filters for these warnings).
5813
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005814- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5815 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5816 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5817 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5818 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5819
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005820- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5821 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5822 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5823 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5824 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5825 older distribution.
5826
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005827Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005828-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005829
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005830- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5831 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005832 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005833
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005834- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5835 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5836 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5837
5838- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5839
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005840- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5841
5842- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5843
5844- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5845
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005846- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005847
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005848- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5849
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005850New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005851-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005852
5853C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005854-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005855
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005856- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5857 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5858 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5859 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5860 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5861 against buffer overruns.
5862
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005863- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005864 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5865 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005866 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5867 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5868 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5869
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005870- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5871 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5872 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5873 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5874 deprecated.
5875
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005876Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005877-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005878
5879- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5880 relevant is found.
5881
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005882
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005883What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005884===========================
5885
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005886*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5887
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005888Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005889----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005890
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005891- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5892 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5893 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5894 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5895 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5896 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5897 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5898 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005899 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005900 repaired.
5901
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005902- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005903 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005904 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5905 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5906 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5907 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5908 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5909 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5910 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5911 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5912
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005913- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5914 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5915 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5916 leading BMO character).
5917
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005918- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5919 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5920 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5921
5922 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5923 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5924 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005925
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005926 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5927 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5928 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5929 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5930 for various simple to use conversions.
5931
5932 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5933 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5934
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005935 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5936 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5937 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5938 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5939 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5940 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5941 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5942 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5943 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5944 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5945 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5946 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5947 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5948 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5949 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005950
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005951- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5952 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5953 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005954 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005955 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005956
5957 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005958 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5959 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5960 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5961 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5962 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005963 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5964 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005965
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005966 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5967 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5968 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005969 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005970
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005971- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5972 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5973 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5974 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5975 floating arithmetic,
5976
5977 x = 9007199254740992.0
5978 print long(x)
5979
5980 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5981 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5982 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5983 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5984 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5985 functions are of good quality).
5986
5987 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5988 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5989 algorithms to break.
5990
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005991- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5992 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5993 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5994 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5995 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5996 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5997 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5998 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5999 order.
6000
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006001- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6002 operation along the most common code paths.
6003
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006004- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6005 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6006
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006007- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6008 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6009 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6010 {}.update(UserDict())
6011
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006012- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6013 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6014 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6015 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6016 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6017 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6018 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6019 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6020
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006021- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006022 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006023
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006024 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006025 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6026 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006027 join() method of strings
6028 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006029 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6030 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006031 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006032 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006033
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006034- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6035 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6036
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006037- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6038 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6039
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006040- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6041 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6042 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6043 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6044
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006045- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6046 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006047 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006048 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6049 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006050
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006051- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6052
6053
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006054Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006055-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006056
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006057- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006058 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006059 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6060 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6061
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006062- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6063 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6064
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006065- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6066 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6067 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6068 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6069
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006070- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6071 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6072 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6073
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006074- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6075
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006076- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6077
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006078- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6079 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6080 that are still imported into string.py).
6081
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006082- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6083
6084- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6085 Now it does.
6086
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006087- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6088
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006089- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6090 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6091 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6092 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6093 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006094 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6095 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006096
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006097- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6098 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6099 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6100 'help(object)'.
6101
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006102Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006103-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006104
6105- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006106 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006107 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6108 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6109
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006110- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006111 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6112 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006113
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006114C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006115-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006116
6117- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6118 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006119
6120----
6121
6122**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**