blob: fcc52d72177b6d377fcca86a6ab3f59c11518102 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XXXX-XX-XX*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
15...
16
17Extension modules
18-----------------
19
20...
21
22Library
23-------
24
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +000025- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
26 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
27 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
28 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
29 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
30 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
31 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
32 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
33 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
34
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000035- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
36 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +000037 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000038
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000039- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
40 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
41 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
42 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
43 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
44 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
45 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
46 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000047
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +000048- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000049 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
50 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
51 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
52 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
53 integration features instead. It would help if those were documented.
54
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +000055- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
56
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000057Build
58-----
59
60...
61
62C API
63-----
64
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000065- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
66 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
67 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000068
69Documentation
70-------------
71
72...
73
74Tests
75-----
76
77- test__locale ported to unittest
78
79Windows
80-------
81
82...
83
84Mac
85---
86
87...
88
89New platforms
90-------------
91
92...
93
94Tools/Demos
95-----------
96
97...
98
99
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000100What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
101=================================
102
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000103*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000104
105Core and builtins
106-----------------
107
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000108- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000109 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
110
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000111- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
112 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
113 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
114 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
115 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
116 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
117 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
118 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000119 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
120 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
121 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
122 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
123 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000124
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000125- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
126 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
127 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
128 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
129 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
130
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000131- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
132
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000133- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
134 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
135
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000136- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
137 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
138 modified the list.
139
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000140- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
141 functions is now writable.
142
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000143- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
144 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
145 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
146 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
147
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000148- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
149 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
150 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
151 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
152 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000153
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000154- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
155 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
156
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000157Extension modules
158-----------------
159
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000160- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
161
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000162- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
163 data.
164
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000165- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
166 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
167 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
168 supposed to have been truncated away.
169
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000170- Added socket.socketpair().
171
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000172- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
173 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
174
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000175- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000176 versions of Python, have now been removed.
177
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000178Library
179-------
180
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000181- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000182 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000183
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000184- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
185 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
186
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000187- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
188 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
189
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000190- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
191
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000192- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
193 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000194
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000195- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
196 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
197
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000198- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
199
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000200- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
201
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000202- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
203
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000204- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
205 Percivall.
206
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000207- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
208 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
209
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000210- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
211 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
212 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000213 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000214
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000215- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
216 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
217 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
218 and exponent.
219
220- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
221
222- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
223 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
224 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
225
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000226- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
227 to the readline module.
228
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000229- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000230 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
231 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000232
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000233- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
234 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
235 contains symlinks.
236
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000237- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
238 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
239
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000240- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
241 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
242 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
243
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000244- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
245 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
246 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
247 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
248 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
249 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
250 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
251 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
252 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
253 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
254 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
255 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
256 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
257
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000258- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
259
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000260Tools/Demos
261-----------
262
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000263- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
264 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
265
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000266- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
267
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000268Build
269-----
270
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000271- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
272 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
273 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
274 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
275 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
276 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
277 plans to do so.
278
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000279- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
280 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
281
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000282- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
283 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
284
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000285- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
286 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
287
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000288- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
289 GNU/k*BSD systems.
290
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000291- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
292 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
293
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000294C API
295-----
296
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000297..
298
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000299Documentation
300-------------
301
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000302- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
303 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
304
305- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
306 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
307 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000308
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000309New platforms
310-------------
311
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000312- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
313
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000314Tests
315-----
316
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000317..
318
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000319Windows
320-------
321
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000322- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
323 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
324 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
325 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
326 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
327 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
328 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
329 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
330 the problem.
331
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000332Mac
333---
334
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000335..
336
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000337
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000338What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
339=================================
340
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000341*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000342
343Core and builtins
344-----------------
345
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000346- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
347 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
348 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
349 sensitive code.
350
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000351- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000352 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000353
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000354 @staticmethod
355 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000356
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000357 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000358
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000359- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
360 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
361 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
362 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
363 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
364 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
365 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
366 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
367 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
368 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
369 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
370
371 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
372 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
373 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
374 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
375 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
376 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
377 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
378
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000379- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
380 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
381
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000382- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000383 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000384
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000385- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000386 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000387 which was missing for no apparent reason.
388
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000389- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000390 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
391 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
392
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000393- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
394 types that support garbage collection.
395
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000396- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
397
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000398- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
399 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
400 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
401 Jython.
402
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000403- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
404
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000405- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
406 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
407
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000408- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
409 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
410 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000411
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000412- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
413 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
414 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
415
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000416Extension modules
417-----------------
418
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000419- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
420
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000421Library
422-------
423
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000424- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
425 TIS-620
426
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000427- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
428 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
429 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
430 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
431 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
432 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
433 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
434 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
435 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
436 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
437
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000438- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
439
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000440- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
441 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
442 same as when the argument is omitted).
443 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
444
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000445- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
446
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000447- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
448 schemes are offered.
449
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000450- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
451
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000452- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
453 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
454 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
455
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000456- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
457
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000458- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
459 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
460
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000461- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
462 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
463 when dummy_threading is being used.
464
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000465- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
466 from a tarfile.
467
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000468- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000469 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000470
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000471- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
472 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
473 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
474 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
475
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000476- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
477 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
478
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000479- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
480 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
481 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
482 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
483 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
484 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
485 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
486 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
487 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
488 by some other method in progress).
489
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000490- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
491 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
492 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000493
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000494- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
495
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000496- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
497 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
498 AM Kuchling.
499
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000500- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
501 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
502 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
503
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000504- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
505 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
506 instead of unsigned.
507
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000508- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000509 no longer part of the public API.
510
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000511- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
512 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
513 string methods of the same name).
514
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000515- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000516 SF patch 945642.
517
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000518- doctest unittest integration improvements:
519
520 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
521
522 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
523 DocTestSuites.
524
525- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
526 that provide thread-local data.
527
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000528- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
529 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
530
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000531- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
532
533- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
534 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
535 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
536
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000537- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
538
539 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
540 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
541 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000542
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000543 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
544 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
545 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
546 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
547
548 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
549 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
550
551 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
552 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
553 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
554 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
555
556 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
557 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
558 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
559 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
560 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
561
562 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
563 wrapping help output.
564
565 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
566 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
567 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000568
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000569C API
570-----
571
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000572- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
573 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
574 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
575 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
576 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
577 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
578 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
579 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
580 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
581 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
582 its visible semantics have not changed.
583
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000584- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
585 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
586
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000587Documentation
588-------------
589
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000590- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000591
592 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000593 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000594
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000595 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000596
597 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
598
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000599- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000600
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000601Tests
602-----
603
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000604- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000605 platforms that use the Makefile.
606
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000607- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
608 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
609 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
610
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000611
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000612What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
613=================================
614
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000615*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000616
617Core and builtins
618-----------------
619
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000620- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
621 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
622 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
623 objects now (one object instead of three).
624
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000625- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
626 Windows DLLs.
627
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000628- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
629 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000630
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000631- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
632 a new .pyc magic.
633
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000634- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
635 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
636 be there.
637
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000638- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
639 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
640 the LC_NUMERIC category.
641
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000642- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
643 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
644 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
645
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000646- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
647
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000648- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
649 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
650 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000651
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000652- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
653 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
654
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000655- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
656
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000657- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000658 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000659
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000660- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
661
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000662- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
663
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000664- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
665 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
666
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000667- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
668 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
669 Fixes bug #858016 .
670
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000671- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
672 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
673 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
674
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000675- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
676 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
677 improves their performance (about 35%).
678
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000679- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
680 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
681 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
682
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000683- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
684 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
685 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
686 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
687
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000688- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
689 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
690 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
691 length is not known).
692
693- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
694 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000695 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
696 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000697 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
698
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000699- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
700 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
701
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000702- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
703 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
704 keyword arguments.
705
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000706- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
707 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
708 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
709
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000710- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
711 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
712 cases.
713
714- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
715 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
716 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
717 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
718 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
719 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
720 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
721 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
722 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
723 a release build.
724
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000725- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
726 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
727
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000728- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000729 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000730
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000731- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
732 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
733 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
734 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
735 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
736 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
737 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
738 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
739 destroyed.
740
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000741- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
742 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
743 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
744 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
745 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
746 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
747 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
748 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
749
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000750- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
751 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
752 character other than a space.
753
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000754- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
755 by the function object or by the method object, the function
756 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
757 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
758 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
759 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
760 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
761 attributes with the same name.
762
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000763- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
764 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
765 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
766 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
767 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
768 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
769 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
770 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
771 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
772 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
773 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
774 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
775 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
776 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000777
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000778- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
779 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
780 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
781 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
782 This has been repaired.
783
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000784- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
785
786- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
787
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000788- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
789 over a sequence.
790
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000791- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000792 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000793
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000794- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
795
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000796- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
797 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
798 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
799 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
800 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
801 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
802 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
803 records with equal keys is unchanged).
804
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000805- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
806 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
807 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
808
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000809- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
810 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
811 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
812 freelist.
813
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000814- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
815 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
816
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000817- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
818 number.
819
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000820- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
821 a TypeError exception.
822
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000823- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
824 820195.
825
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000826- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
827 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
828 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
829
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000830- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000831 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
832 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000833
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000834- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
835 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
836 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
837
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000838- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
839 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000840 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000841
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000842- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000843 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
844 the first call.
845
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000846
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000847Extension modules
848-----------------
849
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000850- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
851 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
852
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000853- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
854 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
855 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
856 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
857 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
858 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
859 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000860
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000861- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
862
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000863- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
864
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000865- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
866 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
867
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000868- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
869 fewer false positives.
870
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000871- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
872 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
873
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000874- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000875 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
876
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000877- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000878 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000879 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000880 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
881 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000882
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000883- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
884 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
885 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
886 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
887
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000888- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
889 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
890 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
891 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
892 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
893 #897625.
894
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000895- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
896 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
897
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000898- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
899 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
900 and pops on either side of the deque.
901
902- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
903 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
904
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000905- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
906 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
907 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
908 other functions that expect a function argument.
909
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000910- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
911
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000912- os.getsid was added.
913
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000914- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
915 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
916 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
917
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000918- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
919
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000920- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
921
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000922- readline.clear_history was added.
923
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000924- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
925
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000926- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
927
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000928- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
929
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000930- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
931
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000932- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
933
934- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
935
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000936- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
937
938- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
939
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000940- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
941 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
942 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
943
944- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
945 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
946 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
947 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
948 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
949 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
950 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
951
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000952- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
953 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
954 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
955 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000956
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000957- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000958 iterators from a single iterable.
959
960- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
961 of raising a TypeError exception.
962
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000963- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
964 as parameter.
965
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000966Library
967-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000968
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000969- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
970 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
971 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000972
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000973- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
974 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
975 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000976
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000977- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000978
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000979- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
980 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000981
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000982- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
983 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
984
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000985- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
986
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000987- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000988 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000989
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000990- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000991 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000992
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000993- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
994
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000995- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
996 on cygwin and mingw32.
997
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000998- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
999
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001000- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1001 module.
1002
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001003- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1004 installation scheme for all platforms.
1005
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001006- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001007 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001008
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001009- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1010 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1011 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1012
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001013- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1014 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1015 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1016
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001017- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1018
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001019- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1020
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001021- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1022 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1023
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001024- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1025 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1026 type pattern with the same value exists.
1027
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001028- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1029 when run from the command prompt).
1030
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001031- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1032 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1033
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001034- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1035 default sort).
1036
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001037- Added global runctx function to profile module
1038
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001039- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1040
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001041- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1042
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001043- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1044
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001045- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001046 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1047 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1048 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1049 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1050 accordingly.
1051
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001052- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1053 decoding standards.
1054
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001055- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1056 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1057 called for all requests.
1058
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001059- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1060 they are passed to the compiler.
1061
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001062- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1063 indent, width and depth.
1064
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001065- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1066 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1067
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001068- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1069 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1070
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001071- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1072
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001073- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1074
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001075- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1076
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001077- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1078 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1079
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001080- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001081 for better performance.
1082
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001083- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001084
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001085- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1086 a string).
1087
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001088- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1089
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001090- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1091
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001092- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1093
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001094- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1095
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001096- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1097 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1098 list of fieldnames.
1099
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001100- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1101 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1102
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001103- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1104
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001105- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1106 empty lists.
1107
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001108- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1109 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1110 and shelves.
1111
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001112- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1113 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1114
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001115- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001116 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1117 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001118
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001119- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1120 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001121 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001122
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001123- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001124 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1125 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1126
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001127- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1128 and removed in Py2.4.
1129
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001130- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1131
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001132- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1133
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001134Tools/Demos
1135-----------
1136
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001137- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1138 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1139
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001140- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1141
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001142- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1143 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1144 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1145 destination in situations where both files are given.
1146
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001147- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1148 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1149 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1150 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1151
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001152- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1153
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001154- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1155 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1156 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1157 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1158 now.
1159
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001160- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1161 in effect
1162
1163- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1164 C-c C-h
1165
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001166- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1167 -d option was given.
1168
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001169Build
1170-----
1171
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001172- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1173 build under OS X.
1174
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001175- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1176 --enable-profiling.
1177
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001178- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1179 is configured --with-tsc.
1180
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001181- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1182 on AMD64.
1183
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001184- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1185 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1186
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001187- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1188 removed.
1189
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001190- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1191 supported (see PEP 11).
1192
1193- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1194
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001195- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1196
1197- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1198 (see PEP 11).
1199
1200- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1201 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1202
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001203C API
1204-----
1205
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001206- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1207 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1208 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1209
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001210- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1211 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1212 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1213 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1214
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001215- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1216 generator objects.
1217
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001218- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1219 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001220 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1221 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001222
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001223- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1224 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1225
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001226- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1227 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1228 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1229 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1230 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1231
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001232- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1233 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1234 about 10% faster.
1235
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001236- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1237 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1238
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001239- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1240 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1241 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1242 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1243
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001244Windows
1245-------
1246
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001247- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1248 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1249 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1250 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1251
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001252- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1253 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1254 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1255
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001256
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001257What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1258===============================
1259
1260*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1261
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001262IDLE
1263----
1264
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001265- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1266 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1267 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1268 context-menu actions.
1269
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001270- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1271 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1272 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1273 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1274 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1275 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1276 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1277 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1278 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1279
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001280
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001281What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1282=============================================
1283
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001284*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001285
1286Core and builtins
1287-----------------
1288
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001289- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001290 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001291 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1292
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001293Extension modules
1294-----------------
1295
1296- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1297 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1298 than once. This has been fixed.
1299
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001300- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1301 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1302 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1303 call.
1304
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001305- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1306
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001307Library
1308-------
1309
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001310- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1311 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1312
1313- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1314 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1315 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1316 restored.
1317
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001318IDLE
1319----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001320
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001321- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001322
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001323Build
1324-----
1325
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001326- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1327 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1328
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001329C API
1330-----
1331
1332Windows
1333-------
1334
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001335- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1336 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1337
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001338- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1339
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001340Mac
1341---
1342
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001343- Various fixes to pimp.
1344
1345- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1346
1347- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1348 more problems than it solves.
1349
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001350
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001351What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1352=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001353
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001354*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1355
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001356Core and builtins
1357-----------------
1358
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001359- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1360 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1361
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001362- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1363 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001364 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001365
1366- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1367 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1368 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001369 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001370
1371- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1372 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001373
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001374- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1375 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1376 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1377
1378- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001379 770247.
1380
1381- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001382
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001383Extension modules
1384-----------------
1385
1386- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1387 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1388
1389- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1390
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001391- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1392
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001393- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1394 contained within the _strptime module.
1395
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001396- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1397 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1398
1399- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001400 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1401
1402- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1403 the find_class attribute, if present.
1404
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001405- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001406
1407 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1408 (SF bug 763298).
1409
1410 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001411 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1412 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1413 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001414
1415 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1416
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001417Library
1418-------
1419
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001420- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1421
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001422- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1423 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1424 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1425 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1426 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1427 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1428 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1429 or Tester().
1430
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001431- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1432 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1433 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1434 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1435 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1436 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1437 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1438 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1439 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001440
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001441 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001442
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001443- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1444 weren't before was an oversight.
1445
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001446- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1447 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1448
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001449- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1450 when there are no lines.
1451
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001452- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1453 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1454
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001455- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1456 to child processes.
1457
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001458- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1459
1460- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1461
1462- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1463 xmlrpclib.
1464
1465- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1466 responses.
1467
1468- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1469 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1470
1471- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1472 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1473 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1474
1475- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1476 used as patterns.
1477
1478- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1479 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1480 than Tk 8.3.
1481
1482- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1483
1484- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001485
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001486Tools/Demos
1487-----------
1488
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001489- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1490
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001491- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1492
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001493- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001494
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001495Build
1496-----
1497
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001498- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1499
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001500- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1501
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001502- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1503 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001504
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001505- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1506 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1507 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001508
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001509C API
1510-----
1511
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001512- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1513 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1514
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001515Windows
1516-------
1517
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001518- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1519 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1520 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1521 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1522 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1523 Python exception ::
1524
1525 thread.error: can't start new thread
1526
1527 is raised now.
1528
1529- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1530 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1531 instead of from DLL teardown.
1532
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001533Mac
1534---
1535
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001536- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001537 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001538 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1539 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1540 the executable in the bundle.
1541
1542- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001543
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001544- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1545
1546- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1547 on Panther.
1548
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001549What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1550================================
1551
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001552*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001553
1554Core and builtins
1555-----------------
1556
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001557- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1558 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1559 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1560 with the -i option.
1561
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001562- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1563 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1564
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001565- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1566 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1567
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001568- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1569 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1570 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1571 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1572 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1573 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1574 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1575 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1576 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1577 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1578 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1579 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1580 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001581
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001582- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1583 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1584 embedded in a lambda expression.
1585
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001586- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1587 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1588 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1589 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1590 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1591
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001592- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1593 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1594 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1595
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001596- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1597 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1598
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001599- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1600 It's writable again.
1601
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001602- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1603 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1604 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001605 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001606
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001607- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1608 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1609 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1610
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001611Extension modules
1612-----------------
1613
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001614- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1615 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1616
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001617- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1618 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1619 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1620 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1621
1622- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1623 collection.
1624
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001625- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1626 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1627 unique within a single program run.
1628
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001629- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1630 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1631
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001632- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1633 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1634
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001635- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1636 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001637
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001638- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1639
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001640- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1641 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1642
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001643- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1644 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1645 for many BSD-derived systems.
1646
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001647
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001648Library
1649-------
1650
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001651- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1652 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1653 primary ones:
1654
1655 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1656 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1657 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1658
1659 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1660 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1661 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1662 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1663 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1664 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1665
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001666- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1667 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1668 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1669 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1670 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1671 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1672 argument.
1673
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001674- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1675 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1676 in the archive.
1677
1678- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1679 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1680
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001681- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1682 569574).
1683
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001684- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1685 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1686 no more.
1687
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001688- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1689 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1690 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1691 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1692 code coverage.
1693
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001694- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1695 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1696 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001697 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1698 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001699
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001700- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1701 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1702 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001703 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001704
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001705- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1706
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001707- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1708 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1709 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1710 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1711
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001712- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1713 handling.
1714
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001715- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1716 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1717
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001718- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1719 in socket.py.
1720
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001721- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1722
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001723- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1724 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1725 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1726 opener with proxy support.
1727
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001728- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1729
1730- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1731
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001732Tools/Demos
1733-----------
1734
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001735- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1736
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001737- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1738
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001739- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1740 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001741
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001742- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1743 files.
1744
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001745Build
1746-----
1747
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001748- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001749 different root directory.
1750
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001751C API
1752-----
1753
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001754- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1755 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1756 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1757 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1758 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1759 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1760 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1761 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1762 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1763 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1764
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001765- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1766 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1767 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1768 from Python.
1769
1770
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001771New platforms
1772-------------
1773
1774None this time.
1775
1776Tests
1777-----
1778
1779- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1780 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1781
1782Windows
1783-------
1784
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001785- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1786
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001787- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1788 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1789 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1790 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1791 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1792 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1793 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1794 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1795 that's what it's for.
1796
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001797Mac
1798---
1799
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001800- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1801 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1802 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1803 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001804- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1805 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1806- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001807
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001808SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1809------------------------------------
1810
1811430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1812598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1813622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1814661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1815683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1816697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1817713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1818724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1819727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1820729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1821730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1822731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1823732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1824733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1825735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1826740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1827744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1828745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1829747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1830749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1831751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1832753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1833755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1834757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1835760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1836
1837
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001838What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1839================================
1840
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001841*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001842
1843Core and builtins
1844-----------------
1845
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001846- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1847 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1848
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001849- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1850 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1851 and cannot be strings).
1852
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001853- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1854 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1855 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1856 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1857
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001858- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1859 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1860 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1861 Python itself.
1862
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001863- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1864 the referenced object, if it has one.
1865
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001866- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1867 the thread started at
1868 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1869
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001870- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1871 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1872 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1873 placed on a list index.
1874
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001875- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1876 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1877 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1878 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1879
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001880- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1881 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1882 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1883 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1884 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1885 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1886 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1887
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001888- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1889 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1890 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1891 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1892 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1893
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001894- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1895 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001896
1897- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1898 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1899 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1900 #693195.)
1901
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001902- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1903 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001904
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001905- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001906 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001907 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1908 interpreter executions, would fail.
1909
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001910- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001911 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001912 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001913
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001914Extension modules
1915-----------------
1916
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001917- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1918 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1919 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1920 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1921
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001922- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1923 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1924
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001925- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1926 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1927 and Greg Chapman.)
1928
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001929- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1930 recursively.
1931
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001932- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001933 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1934 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1935 leaks.
1936
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001937- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1938
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001939- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1940 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1941 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1942 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1943 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1944 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1945 #705836.
1946
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001947- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001948 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1949
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001950- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1951 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1952 See SF bug #692416.
1953
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001954- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1955 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1956
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001957- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1958 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1959 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001960
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001961- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001962 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1963 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1964
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001965- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1966 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1967 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1968 timeouts to work properly.
1969
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001970Library
1971-------
1972
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001973- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1974 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1975 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1976 future release.
1977
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001978- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1979 for querying platform dependent features.
1980
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001981- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001982
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001983- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1984 pickle protocol versions.
1985
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001986- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1987 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1988 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1989
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001990- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1991
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001992- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1993 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1994 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1995 modules.
1996
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001997- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1998 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1999 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2000
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002001- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2002 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2003
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002004- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2005 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2006 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2007
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002008- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002009 MS Office extensions.
2010
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002011- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2012 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2013
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002014- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2015 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2016
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002017- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2018 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2019 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2020 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2021 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2022 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2023
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002024- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2025 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2026 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002027
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002028- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2029 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2030 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2031
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002032- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2033
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002034- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2035 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2036 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2037
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002038Tools/Demos
2039-----------
2040
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002041- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2042 See the module docstring for details.
2043
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002044Build
2045-----
2046
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002047- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2048 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002049
2050C API
2051-----
2052
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002053- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2054
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002055- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2056 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2057 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2058
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002059- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2060 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002061
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002062 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2063 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2064 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002065
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002066- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002067 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2068
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002069- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2070 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2071 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002072
2073New platforms
2074-------------
2075
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002076None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002077
2078Tests
2079-----
2080
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002081- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2082 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002083
2084Windows
2085-------
2086
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002087- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2088 function.
2089
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002090- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2091 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002092
2093Mac
2094---
2095
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002096- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2097 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002098
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002099- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2100 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002101
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002102- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2103 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2104 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002105
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002106- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002107 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2108 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002109
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002110- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2111 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002112
2113
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002114What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2115=================================
2116
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002117*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002118
2119Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002120-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002121
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002122- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2123 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2124 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2125
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002126- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2127 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2128 (SF patch #664376.)
2129
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002130- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2131 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2132 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2133 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2134 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2135 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002136 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002137
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002138- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2139 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2140 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2141 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002142 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002143
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002144- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2145 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2146 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2147 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2148 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2149 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2150 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2151 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2152 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2153 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2154 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2155
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002156- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2157 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2158 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2159 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2160 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2161 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2162
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002163- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2164 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2165
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002166- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2167 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2168 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2169 case.)
2170
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002171- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2172 passed as unicode strings.
2173
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002174- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2175 See SF bug #683467.
2176
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002177- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2178 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2179
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002180- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2181
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002182- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2183
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002184- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2185 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2186 arguments.
2187
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002188- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2189 See SF bug #667147.
2190
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002191- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002192 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002193 See SF bug #676155.
2194
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002195- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002196 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002197 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2198 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2199 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2200 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2201 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2202 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002203
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002204Extension modules
2205-----------------
2206
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002207- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2208 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2209 tp_as_number pointer.
2210
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002211- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2212 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2213 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2214 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2215 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2216
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002217- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2218
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002219- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2220
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002221- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002222 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002223 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2224 patch #678531.)
2225
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002226- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2227 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2228
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002229- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2230 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2231
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002232- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2233
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002234- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2235 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2236 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2237
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002238- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2239
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002240- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2241 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2242
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002243- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002244
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002245- datetime changes:
2246
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002247 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2248
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002249 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2250 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2251 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2252 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2253 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2254 now.
2255
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002256 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002257 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2258 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002259
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002260 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002261 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002262 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2263 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2264 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2265 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002266
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002267 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2268 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2269 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002270 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2271
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002272 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2273 by a later example coded by Guido.
2274
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002275 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002276 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2277 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2278 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002279 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2280 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2281
2282 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2283 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2284 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2285 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2286 tzinfo subclass instance.
2287
2288 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2289 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2290 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2291 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2292 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2293 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2294 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2295 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002296
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002297 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2298 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2299 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2300 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2301 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002302 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2303
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002304 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002305
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002306 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2307 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2308 as a naive datetime object.
2309
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002310 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2311 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2312 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2313
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002314 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2315 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2316 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2317 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2318 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2319 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2320 comparison.
2321
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002322 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2323 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2324 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2325 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002326 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002327
2328 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002329
2330 and ::
2331
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002332 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2333
2334 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2335 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2336 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2337 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2338
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002339 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2340 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2341 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2342 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2343 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2344
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002345 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2346 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002347 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2348 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002349
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002350Library
2351-------
2352
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002353- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2354 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2355
2356- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2357 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2358 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2359 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2360 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2361 See PEP 307 for details.
2362
2363- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2364 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2365
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002366- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2367 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002368 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002369 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2370 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002371 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002372
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002373- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2374 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2375
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002376- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2377 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2378 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2379
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002380- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2381
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002382- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2383 exception.
2384
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002385- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2386 class.
2387
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002388- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2389 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2390 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2391
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002392- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2393 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2394
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002395- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002396 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2397 See SF bug #659228.
2398
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002399- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2400 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2401 See SF patch #651082.
2402
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002403- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002404
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002405- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2406 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2407
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002408- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002409 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002410
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002411- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2412 DOS paths from other platforms.
2413
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002414Tools/Demos
2415-----------
2416
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002417- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2418 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2419 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2420 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2421 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2422 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2423 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2424 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2425 example:
2426
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002427 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2428 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002429
2430 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2431
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002432
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002433Build
2434-----
2435
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002436- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2437 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2438 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002439 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2440
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002441 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2442
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002443- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2444 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2445 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2446 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2447 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2448 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2449 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2450 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2451 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2452
2453- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2454 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2455 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2456 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2457
2458- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2459 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2460
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002461C API
2462-----
2463
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002464- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2465 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002466
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002467- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2468 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2469 tp_as_number pointer.
2470
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002471- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2472 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2473 (SF #681367)
2474
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002475- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2476 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2477 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2478 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002479
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002480Tests
2481-----
2482
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002483- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002484 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2485 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2486 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2487 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2488 pydoc.)
2489
2490- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2491
2492- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002493
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002494Windows
2495-------
2496
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002497- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2498 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2499 time).
2500
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002501- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2502 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2503
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002504- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2505 release without strong cryptography.
2506
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002507- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002508 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002509
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002510- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2511 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2512
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002513Mac
2514---
2515
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002516- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2517 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002518
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002519- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2520 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2521 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002522
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002523- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2524 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002525
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002526- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2527 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2528 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2529 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002530
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002531- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002532 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2533 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2534 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002535
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002536
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002537What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002538=================================
2539
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002540*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002541
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002542Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002543--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002544
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002545- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2546
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002547- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2548 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002549 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002550 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002551 a different meaning than before.
2552
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002553- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002554 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002555 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002556
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002557- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002558 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002559 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002560
2561- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2562 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2563 and deallocation.
2564
2565- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2566 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2567
2568- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2569 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2570 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2571 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2572 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2573
2574- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2575 now detected by the garbage collector.
2576
2577- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2578 [SF bug 519621]
2579
2580- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2581 identifier.
2582
2583- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2584 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2585 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2586 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2587 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2588 [SF bug 563060]
2589
2590- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2591 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2592 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2593 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2594 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2595
2596- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2597 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2598 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2599
2600- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2601
2602- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2603 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2604 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2605 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2606 state of the slots would be lost.)
2607
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002608Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002609-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002610
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002611- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002612 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2613 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2614 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2615 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002616 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2617 Jython 2.1.
2618
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002619- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002620 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002621 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2622 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2623 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2624 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2625 these, see PEP 302.
2626
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002627- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2628 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2629 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2630
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002631- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2632 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2633 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2634
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002635- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2636 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2637 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2638
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002639- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2640 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2641 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2642 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2643 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2644 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2645 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2646 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2647 releases or implementations.
2648
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002649- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002650 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2651 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002652
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002653- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2654 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2655
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002656- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2657 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2658 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2659
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002660- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2661 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2662
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002663- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2664 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002665 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2666 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002667
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002668- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2669 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2670 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2671 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2672 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2673
2674 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2675 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2676 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2677 pattern.
2678
2679 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2680 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2681 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2682 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2683
2684 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2685 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2686 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2687 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2688 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2689 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2690
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002691- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2692 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2693 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2694 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2695 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2696 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2697 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2698 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002699
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002700- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2701 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2702 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2703 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2704 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002705 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2706 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2707 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2708 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2709 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2710 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2711 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002712
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002713- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2714 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2715
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002716- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2717 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2718 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2719 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2720 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2721 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2722 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2723 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2724 to Zack Weinberg!
2725
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002726- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2727 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2728 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2729 type. This has been fixed now.
2730
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002731- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2732 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2733 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2734
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002735- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2736 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2737 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2738 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2739 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2740 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2741 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2742 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002743 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002744
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002745- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2746 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2747 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002748
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002749- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2750 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2751 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2752 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2753 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2754 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2755 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2756 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002757 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002758 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2759 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2760
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002761- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2762 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2763 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2764 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2765 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2766 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2767 this.)
2768
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002769- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2770 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002771 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002772 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002773 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2774 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002775 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2776 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002777
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002778- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2779 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2780 currently running.
2781
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002782- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2783 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2784 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2785 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2786
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002787- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2788 as directory names.
2789
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002790- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2791 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2792
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002793- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2794 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2795
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002796- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002797 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2798 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002799
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002800- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2801 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2802 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2803 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2804 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2805
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002806- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2807 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2808 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2809 removed.
2810
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002811- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2812 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2813 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2814
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002815- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2816 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2817 to __debug__.
2818
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002819- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2820 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2821 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2822
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002823- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2824 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2825 deprecated now.
2826
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002827- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2828 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2829 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002830
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002831- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2832 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2833 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2834 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2835 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002836
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002837- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2838 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2839
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002840- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2841 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2842 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002843 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002844 is backward compatible.
2845
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002846- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2847 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2848 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2849 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2850 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2851
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002852- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2853 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2854 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2855 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2856 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2857 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002858
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002859- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2860 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2861
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002862- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2863 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2864
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002865- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2866 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2867 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2868 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2869 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2870
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002871- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2872 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2873 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2874
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002875- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002876 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2877
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002878- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2879 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2880 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002881
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002882- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2883 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2884
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002885- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2886 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2887 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2888
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002889- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2890
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002891Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002892-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002893
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002894- Added three operators to the operator module:
2895 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2896 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2897 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2898
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002899- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2900
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002901- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2902 archives.
2903
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002904- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2905 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2906 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2907
2908 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2909
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002910- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2911 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2912 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002913 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002914
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002915- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2916 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2917 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2918 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002919 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2920 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2921 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2922 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002923
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002924- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2925 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002926
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002927- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2928
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002929- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2930 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2931
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002932- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2933 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2934 supported.
2935
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002936- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2937
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002938- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2939 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002940
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002941- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2942 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2943
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002944- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2945
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002946- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2947 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2948
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002949- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2950 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2951 functions but callable type objects.
2952
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002953- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002954 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002955 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002956
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002957- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2958 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002959
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002960- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2961 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002962
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002963- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2964 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2965 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2966 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2967
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002968- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2969 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002970
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002971- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2972 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2973 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2974 and __imul__.
2975
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002976- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002977 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2978 is called.
2979
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002980- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2981 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2982 interpreter was compiled.
2983
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002984- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2985 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2986 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002987 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002988 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2989 1, not 2.
2990
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002991- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2992 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2993 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2994 limit.
2995
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002996- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2997 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2998 bug #623464.
2999
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003000- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3001 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3002 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3003 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3004
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003005Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003006-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003007
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003008- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3009
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003010- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3011 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3012 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3013 with Python 2.3a2.
3014
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003015- os.path exposes getctime.
3016
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003017- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003018 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003019 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003020 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003021 unit tests of floating point results.
3022
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003023- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3024 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3025 has been increased.
3026
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003027- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3028 executed.
3029
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003030- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3031 postinstallation script.
3032
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003033- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3034 test the current module.
3035
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003036- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003037 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3038 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3039 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3040 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3041
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003042- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003043 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003044 Ward's Optik package.
3045
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003046- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3047 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3048 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3049 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3050
3051- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3052 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003053 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003054
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003055- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3056 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3057 shelf are binary pickles.
3058
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003059- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3060 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3061
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003062- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3063 modules are iterators now.
3064
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003065- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3066 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3067 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3068 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3069 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3070 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003071
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003072- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3073 with their entity value.
3074
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003075- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3076
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003077- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3078 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003079
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003080- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3081 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003082 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003083
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003084- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3085 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3086 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3087 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3088 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3089 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3090 main():
3091
3092 import locale
3093 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3094
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003095- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3096 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3097
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003098- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3099 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3100 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3101 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3102 to the new standard.
3103
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003104- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3105 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3106 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3107 an extension to the database.
3108
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003109- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3110 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3111 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3112 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003113 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003114
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003115- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003116 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003117
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003118- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3119 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3120 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3121 bounded integers.
3122
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003123- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3124 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3125 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3126 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3127 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3128 in existence.
3129
3130 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3131 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3132 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3133 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3134 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3135 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3136
3137 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3138 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3139 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3140 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3141
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003142- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3143 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3144 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3145
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003146- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3147
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003148- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3149 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3150 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3151 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3152
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003153- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3154 argument.
3155
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003156- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3157 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3158 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3159 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3160 [SF patch 560794].
3161
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003162- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3163 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3164 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003165 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3166 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3167 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003168
3169- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3170 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003171
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003172- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3173 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3174 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3175 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003176
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003177- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3178 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3179 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3180 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3181 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3182
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003183- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003184
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003185- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3186
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003187- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3188 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3189 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3190 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3191 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3192 identical to None.
3193
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003194- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3195 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3196 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3197 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3198 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3199 results now.
3200
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003201- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3202 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3203
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003204- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3205 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3206 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3207 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3208 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3209 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3210 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3211 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3212
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003213- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3214
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003215- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3216 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3217
3218- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3219 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3220 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3221 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3222 and other systems.
3223
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003224- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3225 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3226 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3227 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 +00003228 work well with these.
3229
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003230- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3231
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003232- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003233 connections.
3234
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003235- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3236 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3237 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3238
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003239- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3240 sets
3241
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003242- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3243 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3244 name.
3245
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003246- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3247 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3248 passed in.
3249
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003250- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003251 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003252 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3253 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003254
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003255- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3256
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003257- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3258
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003259- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3260 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3261 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3262
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003263- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3264 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3265 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3266 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003267 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003268
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003269- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003270 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003271 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003272
3273- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3274 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3275 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3276
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003277- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003278 the value of its expression argument.
3279
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003280- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3281 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3282 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3283
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003284- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3285 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3286 skipstone browser was included.
3287
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003288- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3289 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3290
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003291Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003292-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003293
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003294- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3295 names in addition to accepting file names.
3296
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003297- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3298 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3299 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3300 still used and useful.)
3301
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003302- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3303 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3304 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3305 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003306
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003307- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3308 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3309 the generated binary.
3310
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003311Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003312-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003313
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003314- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3315
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003316- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3317 except in the hands of experts.
3318
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003319- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003320 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3321 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3322 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003323
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003324- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3325 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3326 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3327 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3328 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3329 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3330 builds.
3331
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003332- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3333 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3334 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3335 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3336 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3337 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3338 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3339 new type.
3340
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003341- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003342
3343 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3344 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3345 positive infinities.
3346
3347 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3348 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3349 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3350 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3351 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3352 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3353 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3354
3355 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3356
3357 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3358
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003359- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3360 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3361 size of the executable.
3362
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003363- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3364 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3365 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3366 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003367
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003368- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3369
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003370- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3371 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3372 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003373
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003374- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3375 well as Unix.
3376
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003377- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3378 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3379 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3380 modules in the README file for details.
3381
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003382C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003383-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003384
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003385- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3386 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003387 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003388 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003389 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003390
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003391- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3392 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3393 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3394 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3395 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3396 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003397 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003398 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3399 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3400 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3401 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3402 aligned.)
3403
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003404- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3405 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3406 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3407
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003408- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3409 level.
3410
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003411- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3412 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3413 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3414 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3415 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3416
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003417- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3418 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3419 code.
3420
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003421- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3422 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3423 adjusting for negative indices.
3424
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003425- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3426 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3427 object.
3428
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003429- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3430 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3431 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3432
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003433- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3434 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003435
3436- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3437
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003438- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3439 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3440 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3441 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3442
3443- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3444
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003445- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003446
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003447- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003448 without going through the buffer API.
3449
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003450- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003451
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003452- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3453 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3454 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3455 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3456
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003457- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3458 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3459
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003460- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003461 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3462
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003463New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003464-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003465
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003466- OpenVMS is now supported.
3467
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003468- AtheOS is now supported.
3469
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003470- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3471
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003472- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3473
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003474Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003475-----
3476
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003477- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3478 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3479 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003480
3481Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003482-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003483
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003484- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3485 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3486 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3487 bugs.
3488 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003489 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003490 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3491 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003492 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003493
3494- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003495 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003496
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003497- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3498 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3499
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003500- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3501 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003502 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003503 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3504
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003505- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3506 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3507 use files" uninstall option).
3508
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003509- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3510
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003511- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3512 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3513
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003514- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3515 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3516 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3517
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003518- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3519 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3520 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3521 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3522 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003523 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3524 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3525 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003526
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003527- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003528 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003529 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3530 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3531 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3532 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3533 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3534 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3535 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3536 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3537 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3538 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3539 work around.
3540
3541- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3542 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3543 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3544 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3545 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3546 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3547 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3548 specified with O_CREAT too).
3549
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003550Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003551----
3552
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003553- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003554
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003555- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3556 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3557 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3558
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003559- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3560 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3561 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3562
3563- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3564 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3565 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3566 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3567 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3568 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3569 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3570 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003571
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003572- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3573 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3574 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003575
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003576- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3577 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3578 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3579 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3580 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003581
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003582- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3583 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3584 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003585
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003586- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3587 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003588
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003589- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3590 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3591 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3592 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3593 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003594
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003595- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3596 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3597 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3598
3599- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3600 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3601 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003602
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003603- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3604 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3605 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3606 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003607 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003608
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003609- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3610 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003611
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003612- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3613 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003614
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003615- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003616 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003617 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3618 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003619
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003620
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003621What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003622===============================
3623
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003624*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3625
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003626Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003627--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003628
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003629- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3630 with a custom metaclass.
3631
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003632Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003633-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003634
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003635- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3636 are proxies.
3637
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003638Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003639-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003640
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003641- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3642 very short strings.
3643
3644- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3645 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3646 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3647 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3648 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3649
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003650Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003651-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003652
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003653- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3654 close or delete time).
3655
3656- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3657 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3658
3659- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3660
3661- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003662 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003663
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003664Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003665-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003666
3667Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003668-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003669
3670C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003671-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003672
3673New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003674-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003675
3676Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003677-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003678
3679Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003680-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003681
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003682- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3683
3684- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3685 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3686
3687- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3688 deleted at process exit time.
3689
3690- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3691 in backslash.
3692
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003693Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003694----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003695
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003696- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3697 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3698 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3699
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003700
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003701What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003702===========================
3703
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003704*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3705
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003706Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003707--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003708
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003709- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3710 been extensively updated. See
3711
3712 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3713
3714 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3715
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003716- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3717 deleted!
3718
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003719- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3720 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3721 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3722 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3723 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3724
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003725- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3726
3727 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3728 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3729
3730 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3731 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3732 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3733 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3734 supported anyway.
3735
3736 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3737 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3738
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003739- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3740 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3741 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3742 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3743 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003744
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003745- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3746 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3747 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3748
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003749Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003750-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003751
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003752- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3753 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3754 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3755 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3756 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3757 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003758 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3759 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3760 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3761 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003762
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003763- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3764 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3765 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3766
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003767Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003768-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003769
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003770- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3771
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003772Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003773-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003774
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003775- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3776 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3777 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3778 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3779 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3780 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3781
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003782- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3783
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003784- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3785
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003786- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3787
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003788- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3789 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3790 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3791
3792- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3793
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003794Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003795-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003796
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003797- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3798 off a search on Google.
3799
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003800Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003801-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003802
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003803- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3804 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3805 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3806 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3807 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3808 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3809 other platforms should do likewise.
3810
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003811- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3812 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3813 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3814
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003815C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003816-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003817
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003818- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3819 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3820 producing key-value pairs.
3821
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003822- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003823 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003824 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3825 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3826 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3827 previously went unchallenged.
3828
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003829New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003830-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003831
3832Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003833-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003834
3835Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003836-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003837
3838Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003839----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003840
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003841- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3842 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003843
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003844- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3845 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3846 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3847 home.
3848
3849
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003850What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003851===========================
3852
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003853*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3854
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003855Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003856--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003857
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003858- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3859 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003860
3861 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003862 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003863
3864 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3865 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003866 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003867 This needs to be documented.
3868
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003869- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3870 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3871
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003872- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3873 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3874 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3875
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003876- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3877 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3878
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003879- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3880 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3881 class forbids it).
3882
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003883- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3884 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3885 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3886
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003887- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3888
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003889Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003890-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003891
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003892- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3893 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003894 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003895
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003896- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3897 (like 1 + '').
3898
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003899Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003900-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003901
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003902- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3903 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3904 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3905 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003906 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003907 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3908
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003909- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3910 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3911 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3912 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3913
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003914- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3915 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003916 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3917 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3918 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003919
3920- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3921 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003922
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003923- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3924 bytes on its input.
3925
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003926Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003927-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003928
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003929- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003930 convenience function.
3931
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003932- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3933 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3934 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003935 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3936 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3937 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3938 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3939 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3940 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003941
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003942- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3943 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3944 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3945 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3946
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003947- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3948 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3949 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3950
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003951- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3952 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3953 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3954 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3955
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003956- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3957 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003958 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003959 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3960 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3961 new -l and -e options.
3962
3963- statcache is now deprecated.
3964
3965- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3966 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003967 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003968 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3969 time properly taken into account.
3970
3971- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3972 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3973 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3974 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3975
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003976Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003977-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003978
3979Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003980-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003981
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003982- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3983 is built with libdb3 if available.
3984
3985- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3986
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003987C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003988-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003989
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003990- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3991 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3992 PySequence_Size().
3993
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003994- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3995
3996- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3997 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3998 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3999
4000- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4001 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4002
4003- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4004 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4005
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004006New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004007-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004008
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004009- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4010 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4011
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004012- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4013 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4014
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004015- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4016
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004017Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004018-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004019
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004020- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4021 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4022
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004023Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004024-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004025
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004026Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004027----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004028
4029- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4030 removed completely in the next release.
4031
4032- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4033 OSX.
4034
4035- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4036 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4037
4038- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4039
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004040
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004041What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004042===========================
4043
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004044*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4045
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004046Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004047--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004048
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004049- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004050 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004051 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004052 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4053 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004054 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4055 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004056 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4057 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004058
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004059- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4060 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4061
4062- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4063 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4064
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004065Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004066-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004067
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004068- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4069 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4070 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4071 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4072 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4073 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4074 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4075 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4076
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004077- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4078 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4079 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4080 example).
4081
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004082- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004083 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004084 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004085 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004086
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004087- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4088 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4089 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004090 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004091
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004092- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4093 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4094 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4095 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4096 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4097 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4098
4099 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4100
4101 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4102
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004103Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004104-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004105
4106- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4107
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004108- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4109
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004110- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4111 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004112
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004113- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4114 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4115 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4116 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4117 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4118 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004119 attributes.
4120
4121- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4122 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4123 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004124
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004125- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4126 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4127 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004128
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004129- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4130 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4131 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004132 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4133 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4134
4135- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4136 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004137
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004138Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004139-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004140
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004141- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4142 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4143
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004144- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4145 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4146 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4147 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4148
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004149- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4150 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4151 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4152 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4153
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004154 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4155 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4156 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4157 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4158 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4159 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4160 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4161 without losing information).
4162
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004163- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004164 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4165 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4166 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4167 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4168 module).
4169
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004170 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004171 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4172 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4173 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4174 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004175
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004176- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004177 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4178 encoding.
4179
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004180- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4181 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4182
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004183- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004184 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4185
4186- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4187 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4188 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4189 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4190
4191- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4192
4193- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4194 ON, and OFF.
4195
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004196- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4197 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4198
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004199Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004200-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004201
4202- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4203 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4204 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004205
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004206- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4207 been added: -X and -E.
4208
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004209Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004210-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004211
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004212- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4213 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4214
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004215C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004216-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004217
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004218- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4219 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4220 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4221 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4222 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4223
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004224- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4225 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4226 as long) arguments.
4227
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004228- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4229 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4230 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4231 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4232 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4233 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4234
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004235- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4236 input.
4237
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004238New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004239-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004240
4241Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004242-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004243
4244Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004245-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004246
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004247- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4248 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4249 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4250
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004251- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4252 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4253 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004254 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004255
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004256 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4257 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4258 import signal
4259 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004260
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004261 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004262 while 1:
4263 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004264 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004265 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4266 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4267 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4268 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004269
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004270
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004271What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4272===========================
4273
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004274*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4275
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004276Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004277--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004278
4279- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4280 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4281 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4282
4283- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4284 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4285 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4286 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4287 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4288 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4289 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004290
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004291- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004292 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004293 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4294 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4295 associate a docstring with a property.
4296
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004297- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4298 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4299 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4300 other built-in object types.
4301
4302- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4303 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4304 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4305 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4306 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4307
4308- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4309 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4310
4311- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4312 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004313 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004314 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4315 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4316 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4317 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4318 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4319
4320- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4321 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4322 class.
4323
4324- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4325 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4326 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4327 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4328
4329- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4330 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4331 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4332 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4333
4334- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4335 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4336
4337- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4338 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4339 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4340 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4341 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004342 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004343 with the same value as s.
4344
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004345- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4346
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004347Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004348----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004349
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004350- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4351
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004352- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4353 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4354 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4355 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4356 objects.
4357
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004358- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4359 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004360 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4361 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4362
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004363- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4364 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4365 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4366
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004367Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004368-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004369
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004370- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4371 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4372 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4373 by the instances.
4374
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004375- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4376 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4377 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4378
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004379- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4380 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4381 before the entire comparison is complete.
4382
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004383- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4384 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4385 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4386
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004387- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4388 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4389 getwriter().
4390
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004391- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4392 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4393
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004394- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004395 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4396 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4397
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004398- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4399 iterable object.
4400
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004401- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4402 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004403
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004404- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4405 authentication.
4406
4407- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4408 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004409
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004410- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004411 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4412 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4413 a sample driver.)
4414
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004415Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004416-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004417
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004418- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4419 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4420 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4421 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4422 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4423 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4424 kernel has large file support.
4425
4426- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4427 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4428 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4429 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4430 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4431
4432- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4433 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4434 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4435
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004436C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004437-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004438
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004439- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4440 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4441
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004442New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004443-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004444
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004445- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4446 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4447
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004448Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004449-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004450
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004451- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4452 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4453 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4454 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4455 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4456
4457- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4458 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4459 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4460 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4461
4462- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4463 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4464
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004465Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004466-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004467
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004468- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004469 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4470 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004471
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004472
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004473What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4474===========================
4475
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004476*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4477
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004478Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004479----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004480
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004481- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4482 big to represent as a C double.
4483
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004484- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4485 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4486 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4487 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4488 restriction).
4489
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004490- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4491 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4492 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4493 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4494 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4495
4496 >>> dir([])
4497 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4498 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4499 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4500 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4501 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4502 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4503 'reverse', 'sort']
4504
4505 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4506
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004507- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004508 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4509 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4510 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4511 OverflowError exception.
4512
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004513- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004514 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004515 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4516 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4517 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4518 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4519 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004520 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004521 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4522 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4523
4524 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4525 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4526 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4527 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004528
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004529- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004530 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4531 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4532 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4533 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4534 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4535 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4536 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4537 once it is created.
4538
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004539- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4540 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4541 (key, value) pairs.
4542
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004543- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004544 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4545 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4546
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004547- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4548 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4549 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4550 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4551 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004552
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004553- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004554 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4555 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4556
4557 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4558
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004559- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004560 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4561
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004562Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004563-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004564
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004565- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004566 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4567 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004568
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004569- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4570 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4571 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4572 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4573 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4574 in this area anymore).
4575
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004576- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4577 threading.Timer.
4578
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004579- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4580 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4581
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004582- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004583 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4584
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004585- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004586 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4587 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4588 converted to Python longs.
4589
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004590- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004591 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4592
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004593- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4594 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4595 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4596
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004597Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004598-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004599
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004600- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4601 division operators as per PEP 238.
4602
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004603Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004604-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004605
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004606- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4607 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4608 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4609 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4610
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004611C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004612-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004613
4614- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004615
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004616- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4617 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004618 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004619
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004620 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4621 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004622 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004623 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004624
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004625- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004626 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4627 module:
4628
4629 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004630
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004631 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4632 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004633
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004634 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4635 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004636
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004637 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4638
4639 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4640
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004641- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004642 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4643 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4644 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004645
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004646New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004647-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004648
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004649- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4650 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4651 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4652 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4653 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004654
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004655Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004656-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004657
4658Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004659-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004660
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004661- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4662 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4663 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4664 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004665 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4666 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4667 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4668 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4669 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004670
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004671- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004672 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4673
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004674
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004675What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4676===========================
4677
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004678*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4679
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004680Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004681-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004682
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004683- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4684 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4685
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004686- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4687 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4688 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004689
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004690- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4691 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4692 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4693 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004694
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004695- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4696
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004697- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004698
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004699Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004700-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004701
4702- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004703 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004704 the module docstring for details.
4705
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004706Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004707-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004708
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004709- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004710 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4711 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4712 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004713
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004714- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4715 Nick Mathewson.
4716
4717Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004718----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004719
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004720- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4721 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4722 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4723 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4724 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4725 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4726 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4727 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4728
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004729- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4730 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4731 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4732 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4733
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004734- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4735 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4736 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4737 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4738 come a long way).
4739
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004740- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4741 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4742 write filters for these warnings).
4743
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004744- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4745 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4746 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4747 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4748 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4749
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004750- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4751 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4752 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4753 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4754 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4755 older distribution.
4756
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004757Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004758-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004759
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004760- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4761 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004762 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004763
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004764- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4765 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4766 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4767
4768- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4769
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004770- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4771
4772- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4773
4774- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4775
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004776- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004777
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004778- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4779
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004780New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004781-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004782
4783C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004784-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004785
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004786- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4787 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4788 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4789 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4790 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4791 against buffer overruns.
4792
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004793- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004794 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4795 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004796 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4797 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4798 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4799
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004800- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4801 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4802 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4803 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4804 deprecated.
4805
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004806Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004807-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004808
4809- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4810 relevant is found.
4811
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004812
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004813What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004814===========================
4815
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004816*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4817
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004818Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004819----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004820
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004821- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4822 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4823 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4824 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4825 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4826 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4827 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4828 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004829 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004830 repaired.
4831
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004832- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004833 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004834 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4835 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4836 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4837 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4838 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4839 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4840 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4841 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4842
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004843- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4844 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4845 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4846 leading BMO character).
4847
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004848- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4849 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4850 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4851
4852 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4853 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4854 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004855
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004856 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4857 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4858 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4859 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4860 for various simple to use conversions.
4861
4862 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4863 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4864
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4866 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4867 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4868 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4869 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4870 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4871 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4872 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4873 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4874 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4875 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4876 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4877 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4878 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4879 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004880
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004881- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4882 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4883 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004884 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004885 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004886
4887 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004888 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4889 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4890 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4891 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4892 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004893 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4894 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004895
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004896 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4897 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4898 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004899 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004900
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004901- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4902 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4903 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4904 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4905 floating arithmetic,
4906
4907 x = 9007199254740992.0
4908 print long(x)
4909
4910 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4911 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4912 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4913 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4914 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4915 functions are of good quality).
4916
4917 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4918 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4919 algorithms to break.
4920
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004921- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4922 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4923 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4924 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4925 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4926 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4927 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4928 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4929 order.
4930
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004931- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4932 operation along the most common code paths.
4933
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004934- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4935 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4936
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004937- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4938 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4939 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4940 {}.update(UserDict())
4941
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004942- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4943 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4944 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4945 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4946 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4947 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4948 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4949 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4950
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004951- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004952 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004953
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004954 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004955 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4956 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004957 join() method of strings
4958 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004959 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4960 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004961 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004962 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004963
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004964- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4965 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4966
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004967- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4968 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4969
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004970- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4971 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4972 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4973 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4974
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004975- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4976 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004977 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004978 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4979 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004980
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004981- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4982
4983
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004984Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004985-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004986
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004987- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004988 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004989 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4990 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4991
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004992- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4993 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4994
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004995- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4996 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4997 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4998 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4999
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005000- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5001 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5002 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5003
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005004- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5005
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005006- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5007
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005008- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5009 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5010 that are still imported into string.py).
5011
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005012- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5013
5014- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5015 Now it does.
5016
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005017- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5018
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005019- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5020 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5021 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5022 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5023 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005024 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5025 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005026
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005027- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5028 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5029 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5030 'help(object)'.
5031
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005032Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005033-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005034
5035- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005036 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005037 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5038 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5039
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005040- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005041 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5042 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005043
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005044C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005045-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005046
5047- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5048 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005049
5050----
5051
5052**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**