blob: 33d673254907b690a330bcf6f8e089d9abbf880d [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000015- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
16 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
17
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000018- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000019 (fixes bug #1119418).
20
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000021- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
22
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000023- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
24 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
25
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000026- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
27 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
28 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
29
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000030- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
31
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000032- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
33 reference counts in some error exit cases.
34
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000035- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
36 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
37 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
38 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
39 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
40 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
41 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
42 realloc.
43
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000044- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
45 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
46
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000047- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
48 like their int counterparts.
49
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000050- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
51 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
52 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
53 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
54 for a longer write-up of the problem).
55
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000056- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
57 serializing floats.
58
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000059- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
60 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
61 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
62
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000063- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
64 278.
65
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000066- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
67 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
68 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
69 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +000070 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000071 PyNumber_*().
72 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
73
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000074- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
75 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
76 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
77 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
78
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000079- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
80 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
81 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
82 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
83 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
84
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000085- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
86 disabled caused a crash.
87
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000088- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
89 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
90
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000091- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000092 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
93
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000094- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
95
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000096- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000097 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
98 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
99 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000100
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000101- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
102
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000103- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
104 returning None.
105
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000106- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000107 ('\') with a specific error message.
108
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000109- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
110
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000111- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
112 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
113
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000114- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000115 an ferror() call.
116
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000117- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
118 list.sort().
119
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000120- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
121 (2+3) --> (5).
122
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000123- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
124
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000125- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
126 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000127
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000128- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
129 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
130 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
131
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000132- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
133 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
134 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
135
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000136Extension Modules
137-----------------
138
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000139- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
140 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000141
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000142- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
143
144- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000145 line without newlines.
146
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000147- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
148 on Windows.
149
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000150- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
151 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
152
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000153- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
154 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
155 for large or negative values.
156
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000157- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000158 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000159
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000160- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
161
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000162- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
163 if available on the platform.
164
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000165- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
166 available on the platform.
167
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000168- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
169 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
170
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000171- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
172
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000173- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
174 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
175 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
176
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000177- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
178
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000179- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
180 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
181
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000182- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000183 file size.
184
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000185- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
186
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000187- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
188 {remove_history,replace_history}
189
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000190- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
191 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000192
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000193- stat_float_times is now True.
194
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000195- array.array objects are now picklable.
196
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000197- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
198 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
199
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000200- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
201 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
202 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
203
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000204- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
205 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000206
207Library
208-------
209
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000210- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
211
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000212- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
213 functionality.
214
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000215- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
216
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000217- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
218 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
219
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000220- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
221 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
222 match the Content-Length header.
223
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000224- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
225
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000226- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
227 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
228 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
229
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000230- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
231
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000232- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
233
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000234- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
235 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
236
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000237- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
238 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
239 Tkdnd.
240
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000241- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
242 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
243
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000244- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
245 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
246
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000247- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000248 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
249
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000250- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
251 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
252
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000253- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
254 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
255
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000256- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000257 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000258
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000259- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
260
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000261- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
262 error messages.
263
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000264- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
265
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000266- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
267 Bug #1224621.
268
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000269- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
270 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
271 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
272 terminates by raising StopIteration.
273
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000274- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
275
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000276- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
277 component of the path.
278
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000279- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
280 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
281 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
282 class at all.
283
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000284- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
285 files to PyPI.
286
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000287- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
288 them to PyPI.
289
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000290- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
291 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
292 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
293 work as expected.
294
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000295- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
296 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
297
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000298- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000299 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
300
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000301- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
302
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000303- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
304 to build.
305
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000306- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
307 symbolic links on Windows.
308
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000309- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000310 profile.py if available.
311
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000312- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
313
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000314- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
315 in LWPCookieJar.
316
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000317- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
318
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000319- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
320
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000321- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
322
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000323- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
324
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000325- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
326
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000327- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
328
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000329- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
330
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000331- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
332
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000333- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
334 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
335 be exploited in various ways.
336
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000337- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
338
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000339- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
340
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000341- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
342
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000343- Enhancements to the csv module:
344
345 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000346 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000347 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000348 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
349 reporting.
350 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
351 dictates.
352 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000353 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000354 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000355 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
356 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000357 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
358 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000359 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000360 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
361 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
362 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
363 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
364 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
365 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
366 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
367 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
368 without first creating a dialect class.
369 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
370 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
371 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000372 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000373 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
374 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000375 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
376 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
377 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
378 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000379 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
380 This has been fixed.
381
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000382- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
383 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
384 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
385 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
386
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000387- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
388
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000389- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
390 (Bug #951915).
391
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000392- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
393 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
394 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000395 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000396
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000397- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
398
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000399- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
400 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
401
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000402- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
403
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000404- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
405
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000406- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
407
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000408- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
409
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000410- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
411
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000412- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
413 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
414 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
415
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000416- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000417 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000418
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000419- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
420 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
421 tokenizer with very long source lines.
422
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000423- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
424 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
425
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000426- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
427 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000428
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000429- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
430 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
431
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000432- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
433 correctly.
434
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000435- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
436 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
437 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
438 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
439 between two lines.
440
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000441- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
442 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
443 handlers.
444
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000445- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000446 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
447 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000448
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000449- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
450 considering it exactly like a '*'.
451
452
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000453Build
454-----
455
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000456- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
457 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
458
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000459- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
460 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
461
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000462- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
463 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
464 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000465 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000466
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000467- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
468 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
469 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
470
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000471- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
472
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000473- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
474 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
475
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000476- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
477 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
478 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
479 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
480 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
481 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
482 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
483 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
484
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000485- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
486 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
487 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
488 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
489
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000490
491C API
492-----
493
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000494- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
495
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000496- Removed PyRange_New().
497
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000498
499Tests
500-----
501
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000502- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000503
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000504
505Documentation
506-------------
507
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000508- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
509
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000510- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
511
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000512- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
513
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000514- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
515
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000516- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
517
518- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
519
520- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
521
522- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
523
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000524- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
525 Closes bug #1166582.
526
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000527- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
528 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
529 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
530
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000531Mac
532---
533
534
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000535New platforms
536-------------
537
538- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
539
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000540
541Tools/Demos
542-----------
543
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000544- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
545 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
546 source files that need an encoding declaration.
547 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
548
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000549- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
550
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000551- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000552
553
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000554What's New in Python 2.4 final?
555===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000556
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000557*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000558
559Core and builtins
560-----------------
561
562- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
563 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
564 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
565
566
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000567What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
568==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000569
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000570*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000571
572Core and builtins
573-----------------
574
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000575- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
576 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
577 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
578
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000579
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000580Library
581-------
582
583- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
584 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
585 raised is re-raised.
586
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000587- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
588 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
589
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000590- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
591 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
592 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
593 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
594 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
595 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
596 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
597 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
598 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
599 by the slice are recomputed now.
600
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000601- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000602
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000603Build
604-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000605
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000606- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
607 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
608 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000609
610C API
611-----
612
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000613- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
614
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000615
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000616What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
617================================
618
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000619*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000620
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000621License
622-------
623
624The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
625is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
626changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
627Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
628intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
629durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
630the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
631License::
632
633 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
634
635says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
636to Python 2.1.1.
637
638The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
639License Version 2.
640
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000641Core and builtins
642-----------------
643
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000644- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
645 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
646 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
647 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
648 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
649 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
650 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
651 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
652 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
653 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
654
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000655- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000656
657Extension Modules
658-----------------
659
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000660- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
661 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
662 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
663 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000664
665Library
666-------
667
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000668- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
669 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
670 returned.
671
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000672- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
673
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000674- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
675 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
676
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000677- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
678
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000679- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
680 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000681
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000682- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
683
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000684- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
685
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000686- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000687 the source code is updated and reloaded.
688
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000689Build
690-----
691
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000692- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000693
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000694What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
695================================
696
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000697*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000698
699Core and builtins
700-----------------
701
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000702- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000703 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
704
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000705- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
706 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
707 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
708 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
709
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000710- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
711 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
712
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000713- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
714 constant.
715
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000716- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
717 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
718 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
719 large), and to anomalies such as
720 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
721 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
722 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
723 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000724
725Extension modules
726-----------------
727
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000728- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
729 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000730 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
731 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
732 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000733
734Library
735-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000736
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000737- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000738 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000739 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
740 --swig-cpp.
741
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000742- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
743 it is set.
744
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000745- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000746
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000747- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
748 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
749 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
750 Closes bug #1039270.
751
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000752- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000753
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000754 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000755 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
756 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
757 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
758 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
759 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
760 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
761 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
762 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
763 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
764 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
765 + Updates to documentation.
766
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000767- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
768 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
769 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
770 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
771
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000772- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000773
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000774- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
775 applications should use the getmember function.
776
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000777- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
778
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000779- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
780 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
781 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
782 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
783 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
784 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
785 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
786 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
787 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
788
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000789- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
790 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000791 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000792
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000793- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
794 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
795 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
796 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
797 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
798 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
799 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
800 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000801
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000802- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
803 the new public features (of which there are many).
804
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000805- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000806 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
807 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
808 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
809 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000810 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000811
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000812- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
813
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000814- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
815 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
816 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
817 options.
818
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000819- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
820 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
821 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
822 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
823 conditions under which non-string values work.
824
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000825Build
826-----
827
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000828- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
829 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
830 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
831
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000832- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
833 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
834 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
835 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
836 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000837
838C API
839-----
840
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000841- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
842 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
843
844- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
845
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000846- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
847 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
848 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
849 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
850 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
851 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
852 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
853 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
854 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
855
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000856- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
857
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000858- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
859 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
860 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000861
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000862Tests
863-----
864
865- test__locale ported to unittest
866
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000867Mac
868---
869
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000870- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
871 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
872 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000873
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000874Tools/Demos
875-----------
876
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000877- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
878 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
879 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
880 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
881 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000882
883
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000884What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
885=================================
886
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000887*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000888
889Core and builtins
890-----------------
891
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000892- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000893 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
894
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000895- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
896 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
897 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
898 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
899 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
900 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
901 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
902 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000903 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
904 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
905 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
906 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
907 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000908
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000909- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
910 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
911 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
912 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
913 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
914
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000915- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
916
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000917- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
918 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
919
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000920- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
921 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
922 modified the list.
923
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000924- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
925 functions is now writable.
926
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000927- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
928 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
929 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
930 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
931
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000932- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
933 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
934 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
935 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
936 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000937
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000938- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
939 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
940
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000941Extension modules
942-----------------
943
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000944- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
945
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000946- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
947 data.
948
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000949- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
950 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
951 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
952 supposed to have been truncated away.
953
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000954- Added socket.socketpair().
955
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000956- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
957 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
958
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000959- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000960 versions of Python, have now been removed.
961
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000962Library
963-------
964
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000965- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000966 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000967
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000968- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
969 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
970
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000971- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
972 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
973
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000974- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
975
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000976- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
977 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000978
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000979- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
980 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
981
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000982- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
983
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000984- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
985
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000986- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
987
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000988- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
989 Percivall.
990
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000991- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
992 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
993
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000994- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
995 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
996 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000997 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000998
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000999- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1000 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1001 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1002 and exponent.
1003
1004- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1005
1006- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001007 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001008 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1009
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001010- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1011 to the readline module.
1012
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001013- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001014 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1015 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001016
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001017- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1018 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1019 contains symlinks.
1020
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001021- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1022 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1023
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001024- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1025 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1026 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1027
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001028- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1029 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1030 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1031 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1032 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1033 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1034 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1035 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1036 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1037 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1038 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1039 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1040 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1041
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001042- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1043
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001044Tools/Demos
1045-----------
1046
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001047- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1048 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1049
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001050- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1051
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001052Build
1053-----
1054
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001055- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1056 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1057 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1058 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1059 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1060 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1061 plans to do so.
1062
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001063- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1064 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1065
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001066- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1067 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1068
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001069- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1070 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1071
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001072- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1073 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1074
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001075- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1076 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1077
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001078C API
1079-----
1080
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001081..
1082
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001083Documentation
1084-------------
1085
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001086- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1087 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1088
1089- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1090 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1091 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001092
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001093New platforms
1094-------------
1095
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001096- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1097
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001098Tests
1099-----
1100
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001101..
1102
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001103Windows
1104-------
1105
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001106- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1107 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1108 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1109 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1110 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1111 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1112 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1113 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1114 the problem.
1115
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001116Mac
1117---
1118
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001119..
1120
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001121
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001122What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1123=================================
1124
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001125*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001126
1127Core and builtins
1128-----------------
1129
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001130- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1131 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1132 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1133 sensitive code.
1134
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001135- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001136 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001137
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001138 @staticmethod
1139 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001140
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001141 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001142
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001143- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1144 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1145 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1146 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1147 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1148 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1149 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1150 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1151 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1152 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1153 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1154
1155 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1156 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1157 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1158 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1159 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1160 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1161 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1162
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001163- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1164 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1165
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001166- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001167 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001168
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001169- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001170 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001171 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1172
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001173- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001174 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1175 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1176
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001177- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1178 types that support garbage collection.
1179
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001180- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1181
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001182- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1183 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1184 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1185 Jython.
1186
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001187- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1188
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001189- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1190 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1191
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001192- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1193 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1194 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001195
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001196- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1197 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1198 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1199
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001200Extension modules
1201-----------------
1202
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001203- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1204
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001205Library
1206-------
1207
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001208- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1209 TIS-620
1210
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001211- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1212 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1213 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1214 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1215 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1216 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1217 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1218 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1219 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1220 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1221
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001222- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1223
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001224- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1225 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1226 same as when the argument is omitted).
1227 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1228
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001229- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1230
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001231- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1232 schemes are offered.
1233
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001234- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1235
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001236- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1237 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1238 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1239
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001240- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1241
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001242- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1243 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1244
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001245- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1246 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1247 when dummy_threading is being used.
1248
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001249- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1250 from a tarfile.
1251
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001252- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001253 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001254
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001255- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1256 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1257 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1258 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1259
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001260- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1261 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1262
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001263- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1264 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1265 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1266 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1267 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1268 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1269 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1270 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1271 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1272 by some other method in progress).
1273
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001274- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1275 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1276 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001277
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001278- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1279
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001280- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1281 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1282 AM Kuchling.
1283
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001284- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1285 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1286 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1287
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001288- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1289 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1290 instead of unsigned.
1291
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001292- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001293 no longer part of the public API.
1294
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001295- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1296 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1297 string methods of the same name).
1298
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001299- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001300 SF patch 945642.
1301
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001302- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1303
1304 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1305
1306 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1307 DocTestSuites.
1308
1309- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1310 that provide thread-local data.
1311
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001312- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1313 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1314
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001315- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1316
1317- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1318 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1319 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1320
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001321- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1322
1323 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1324 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1325 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001326
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001327 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1328 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1329 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1330 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1331
1332 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1333 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1334
1335 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1336 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1337 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1338 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1339
1340 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1341 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1342 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1343 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1344 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1345
1346 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1347 wrapping help output.
1348
1349 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1350 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1351 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001352
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001353C API
1354-----
1355
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001356- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1357 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1358 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1359 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1360 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1361 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1362 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1363 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1364 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1365 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1366 its visible semantics have not changed.
1367
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001368- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1369 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1370
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001371Documentation
1372-------------
1373
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001374- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001375
1376 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001377 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001378
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001379 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001380
1381 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1382
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001383- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001384
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001385Tests
1386-----
1387
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001388- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001389 platforms that use the Makefile.
1390
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001391- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1392 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1393 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1394
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001395
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001396What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1397=================================
1398
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001399*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001400
1401Core and builtins
1402-----------------
1403
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001404- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1405 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1406 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1407 objects now (one object instead of three).
1408
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001409- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1410 Windows DLLs.
1411
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001412- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1413 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001414
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001415- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1416 a new .pyc magic.
1417
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001418- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1419 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1420 be there.
1421
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001422- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1423 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1424 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1425
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001426- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1427 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1428 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1429
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001430- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1431
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001432- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1433 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1434 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001435
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001436- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1437 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1438
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001439- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1440
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001441- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001442 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001443
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001444- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1445
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001446- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1447
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001448- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1449 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1450
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001451- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1452 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1453 Fixes bug #858016 .
1454
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001455- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1456 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1457 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1458
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001459- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1460 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1461 improves their performance (about 35%).
1462
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001463- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1464 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1465 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1466
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001467- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1468 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1469 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1470 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1471
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001472- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1473 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001474 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001475 length is not known).
1476
1477- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1478 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001479 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1480 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001481 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1482
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001483- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1484 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1485
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001486- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1487 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1488 keyword arguments.
1489
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001490- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1491 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1492 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1493
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001494- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1495 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1496 cases.
1497
1498- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1499 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1500 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1501 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1502 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1503 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1504 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1505 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1506 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1507 a release build.
1508
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001509- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1510 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1511
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001512- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001513 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001514
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001515- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1516 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1517 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1518 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1519 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1520 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1521 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1522 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1523 destroyed.
1524
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001525- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1526 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1527 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1528 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1529 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1530 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1531 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1532 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1533
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001534- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1535 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1536 character other than a space.
1537
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001538- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1539 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1540 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1541 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1542 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1543 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1544 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1545 attributes with the same name.
1546
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001547- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1548 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1549 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1550 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1551 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1552 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1553 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1554 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1555 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1556 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1557 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1558 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1559 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1560 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001561
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001562- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1563 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1564 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1565 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1566 This has been repaired.
1567
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001568- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1569
1570- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1571
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001572- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1573 over a sequence.
1574
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001575- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001576 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001577
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001578- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1579
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001580- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1581 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1582 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1583 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1584 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1585 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1586 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1587 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1588
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001589- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1590 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1591 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1592
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001593- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1594 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1595 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1596 freelist.
1597
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001598- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1599 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1600
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001601- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1602 number.
1603
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001604- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1605 a TypeError exception.
1606
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001607- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1608 820195.
1609
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001610- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1611 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1612 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1613
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001614- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001615 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1616 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001617
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001618- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1619 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1620 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1621
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001622- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1623 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001624 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001625
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001626- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001627 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1628 the first call.
1629
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001630
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001631Extension modules
1632-----------------
1633
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001634- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1635 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1636
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001637- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1638 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1639 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1640 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1641 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1642 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1643 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001644
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001645- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1646
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001647- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1648
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001649- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1650 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1651
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001652- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1653 fewer false positives.
1654
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001655- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1656 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1657
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001658- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001659 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1660
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001661- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001662 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001663 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001664 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1665 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001666
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001667- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1668 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1669 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1670 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1671
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001672- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1673 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1674 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1675 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1676 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1677 #897625.
1678
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001679- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1680 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1681
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001682- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1683 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1684 and pops on either side of the deque.
1685
1686- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1687 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1688
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001689- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1690 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1691 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1692 other functions that expect a function argument.
1693
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001694- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1695
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001696- os.getsid was added.
1697
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001698- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1699 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1700 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1701
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001702- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1703
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001704- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1705
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001706- readline.clear_history was added.
1707
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001708- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1709
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001710- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1711
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001712- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1713
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001714- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1715
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001716- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1717
1718- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1719
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001720- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1721
1722- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1723
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001724- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1725 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1726 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1727
1728- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1729 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1730 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1731 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1732 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1733 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1734 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1735
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001736- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1737 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1738 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1739 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001740
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001741- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001742 iterators from a single iterable.
1743
1744- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1745 of raising a TypeError exception.
1746
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001747- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1748 as parameter.
1749
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001750Library
1751-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001752
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001753- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1754
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001755- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1756 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1757 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001758
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001759- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1760 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1761 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001762
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001763- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001764
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001765- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1766 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001767
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001768- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1769 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1770
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001771- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1772
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001773- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001774 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001775
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001776- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001777 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001778
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001779- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1780
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001781- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1782 on cygwin and mingw32.
1783
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001784- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1785
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001786- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1787 module.
1788
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001789- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1790 installation scheme for all platforms.
1791
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001792- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001793 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001794
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001795- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1796 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1797 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1798
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001799- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1800 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1801 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1802
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001803- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1804
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001805- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1806
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001807- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1808 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1809
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001810- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1811 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1812 type pattern with the same value exists.
1813
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001814- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1815 when run from the command prompt).
1816
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001817- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1818 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1819
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001820- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1821 default sort).
1822
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001823- Added global runctx function to profile module
1824
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001825- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1826
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001827- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1828
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001829- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1830
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001831- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001832 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1833 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1834 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1835 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1836 accordingly.
1837
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001838- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1839 decoding standards.
1840
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001841- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1842 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1843 called for all requests.
1844
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001845- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1846 they are passed to the compiler.
1847
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001848- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1849 indent, width and depth.
1850
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001851- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1852 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1853
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001854- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1855 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1856
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001857- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1858
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001859- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1860
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001861- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1862
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001863- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1864 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1865
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001866- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001867 for better performance.
1868
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001869- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001870
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001871- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1872 a string).
1873
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001874- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1875
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001876- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1877
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001878- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1879
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001880- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1881
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001882- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1883 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1884 list of fieldnames.
1885
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001886- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1887 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1888
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001889- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1890
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001891- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1892 empty lists.
1893
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001894- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1895 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1896 and shelves.
1897
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001898- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1899 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1900
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001901- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001902 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1903 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001904
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001905- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1906 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001907 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001908
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001909- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001910 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1911 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1912
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001913- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1914 and removed in Py2.4.
1915
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001916- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1917
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001918- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1919
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001920Tools/Demos
1921-----------
1922
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001923- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1924 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1925
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001926- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1927
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001928- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1929 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1930 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1931 destination in situations where both files are given.
1932
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001933- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1934 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1935 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1936 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1937
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001938- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1939
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001940- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1941 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1942 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1943 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1944 now.
1945
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001946- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1947 in effect
1948
1949- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1950 C-c C-h
1951
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001952- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1953 -d option was given.
1954
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001955Build
1956-----
1957
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001958- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1959 build under OS X.
1960
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001961- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1962 --enable-profiling.
1963
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001964- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1965 is configured --with-tsc.
1966
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001967- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1968 on AMD64.
1969
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001970- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1971 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1972
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001973- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1974 removed.
1975
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001976- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1977 supported (see PEP 11).
1978
1979- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1980
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001981- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1982
1983- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1984 (see PEP 11).
1985
1986- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1987 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1988
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001989C API
1990-----
1991
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001992- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1993 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1994 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1995
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001996- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1997 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1998 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1999 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2000
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002001- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2002 generator objects.
2003
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002004- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2005 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002006 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2007 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002008
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002009- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2010 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2011
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002012- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2013 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2014 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2015 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2016 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2017
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002018- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2019 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2020 about 10% faster.
2021
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002022- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2023 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2024
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002025- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2026 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2027 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2028 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2029
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002030Windows
2031-------
2032
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002033- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2034 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2035 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2036 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2037
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002038- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2039 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2040 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2041
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002042
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002043What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2044===============================
2045
2046*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2047
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002048IDLE
2049----
2050
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002051- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2052 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2053 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2054 context-menu actions.
2055
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002056- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2057 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2058 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2059 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2060 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2061 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2062 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2063 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2064 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2065
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002066
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002067What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2068=============================================
2069
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002070*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002071
2072Core and builtins
2073-----------------
2074
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002075- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002076 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002077 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2078
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002079Extension modules
2080-----------------
2081
2082- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2083 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2084 than once. This has been fixed.
2085
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002086- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2087 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2088 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2089 call.
2090
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002091- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2092
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002093Library
2094-------
2095
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002096- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2097 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2098
2099- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2100 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2101 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2102 restored.
2103
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002104IDLE
2105----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002106
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002107- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002108
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002109Build
2110-----
2111
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002112- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2113 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2114
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002115C API
2116-----
2117
2118Windows
2119-------
2120
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002121- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2122 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2123
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002124- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2125
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002126Mac
2127---
2128
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002129- Various fixes to pimp.
2130
2131- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2132
2133- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2134 more problems than it solves.
2135
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002136
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002137What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2138=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002139
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002140*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2141
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002142Core and builtins
2143-----------------
2144
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002145- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2146 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2147
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002148- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2149 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002150 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002151
2152- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2153 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2154 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002155 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002156
2157- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2158 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002159
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002160- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2161 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2162 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2163
2164- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002165 770247.
2166
2167- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002168
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002169Extension modules
2170-----------------
2171
2172- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2173 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2174
2175- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2176
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002177- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2178
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002179- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2180 contained within the _strptime module.
2181
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002182- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2183 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2184
2185- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002186 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2187
2188- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2189 the find_class attribute, if present.
2190
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002191- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002192
2193 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2194 (SF bug 763298).
2195
2196 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002197 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2198 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2199 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002200
2201 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2202
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002203Library
2204-------
2205
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002206- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2207
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002208- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2209 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2210 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2211 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2212 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2213 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2214 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2215 or Tester().
2216
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002217- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2218 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2219 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2220 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2221 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2222 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2223 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2224 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2225 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002226
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002227 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002228
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002229- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2230 weren't before was an oversight.
2231
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002232- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2233 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2234
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002235- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2236 when there are no lines.
2237
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002238- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2239 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2240
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002241- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2242 to child processes.
2243
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002244- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2245
2246- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2247
2248- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2249 xmlrpclib.
2250
2251- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2252 responses.
2253
2254- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2255 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2256
2257- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2258 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2259 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2260
2261- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2262 used as patterns.
2263
2264- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2265 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2266 than Tk 8.3.
2267
2268- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2269
2270- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002271
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002272Tools/Demos
2273-----------
2274
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002275- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2276
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002277- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2278
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002279- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002280
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002281Build
2282-----
2283
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002284- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2285
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002286- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2287
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002288- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2289 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002290
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002291- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2292 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2293 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002294
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002295C API
2296-----
2297
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002298- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2299 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2300
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002301Windows
2302-------
2303
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002304- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2305 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2306 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2307 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2308 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2309 Python exception ::
2310
2311 thread.error: can't start new thread
2312
2313 is raised now.
2314
2315- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2316 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2317 instead of from DLL teardown.
2318
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002319Mac
2320---
2321
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002322- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002323 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002324 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2325 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2326 the executable in the bundle.
2327
2328- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002329
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002330- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2331
2332- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2333 on Panther.
2334
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002335What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2336================================
2337
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002338*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002339
2340Core and builtins
2341-----------------
2342
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002343- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2344 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2345 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2346 with the -i option.
2347
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002348- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2349 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2350
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002351- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2352 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2353
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002354- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2355 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2356 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2357 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2358 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2359 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2360 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2361 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2362 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2363 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2364 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2365 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2366 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002367
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002368- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2369 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2370 embedded in a lambda expression.
2371
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002372- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2373 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2374 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2375 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2376 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2377
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002378- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2379 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2380 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2381
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002382- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2383 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2384
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002385- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2386 It's writable again.
2387
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002388- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2389 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2390 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002391 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002392
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002393- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2394 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2395 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2396
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002397Extension modules
2398-----------------
2399
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002400- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2401 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2402
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002403- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2404 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2405 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2406 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2407
2408- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2409 collection.
2410
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002411- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2412 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2413 unique within a single program run.
2414
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002415- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2416 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2417
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002418- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2419 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2420
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002421- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2422 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002423
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002424- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2425
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002426- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2427 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2428
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002429- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2430 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2431 for many BSD-derived systems.
2432
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002433
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002434Library
2435-------
2436
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002437- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2438 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2439 primary ones:
2440
2441 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2442 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2443 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2444
2445 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2446 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2447 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2448 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2449 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2450 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2451
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002452- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2453 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2454 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2455 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2456 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2457 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2458 argument.
2459
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002460- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2461 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2462 in the archive.
2463
2464- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2465 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2466
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002467- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2468 569574).
2469
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002470- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2471 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2472 no more.
2473
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002474- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2475 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2476 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2477 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2478 code coverage.
2479
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002480- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2481 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2482 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002483 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2484 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002485
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002486- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2487 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2488 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002489 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002490
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002491- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2492
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002493- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2494 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2495 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2496 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2497
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002498- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2499 handling.
2500
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002501- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2502 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2503
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002504- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2505 in socket.py.
2506
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002507- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2508
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002509- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2510 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2511 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2512 opener with proxy support.
2513
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002514- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2515
2516- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2517
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002518Tools/Demos
2519-----------
2520
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002521- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2522
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002523- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2524
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002525- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2526 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002527
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002528- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2529 files.
2530
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002531Build
2532-----
2533
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002534- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002535 different root directory.
2536
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002537C API
2538-----
2539
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002540- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2541 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2542 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2543 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2544 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2545 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2546 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2547 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2548 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2549 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2550
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002551- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2552 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2553 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2554 from Python.
2555
2556
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002557New platforms
2558-------------
2559
2560None this time.
2561
2562Tests
2563-----
2564
2565- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2566 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2567
2568Windows
2569-------
2570
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002571- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2572
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002573- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2574 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2575 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2576 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2577 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2578 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2579 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2580 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2581 that's what it's for.
2582
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002583Mac
2584---
2585
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002586- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2587 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2588 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2589 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002590- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2591 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2592- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002593
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002594SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2595------------------------------------
2596
2597430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2598598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2599622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2600661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2601683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2602697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2603713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2604724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2605727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2606729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2607730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2608731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2609732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2610733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2611735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2612740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2613744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2614745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2615747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2616749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2617751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2618753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2619755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2620757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2621760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2622
2623
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002624What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2625================================
2626
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002627*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002628
2629Core and builtins
2630-----------------
2631
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002632- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2633 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2634
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002635- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2636 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2637 and cannot be strings).
2638
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002639- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2640 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2641 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2642 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2643
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002644- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2645 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2646 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2647 Python itself.
2648
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002649- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2650 the referenced object, if it has one.
2651
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002652- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2653 the thread started at
2654 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2655
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002656- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2657 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2658 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2659 placed on a list index.
2660
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002661- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2662 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2663 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2664 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2665
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002666- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2667 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2668 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2669 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2670 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2671 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2672 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2673
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002674- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2675 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2676 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2677 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2678 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2679
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002680- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2681 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002682
2683- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2684 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2685 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2686 #693195.)
2687
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002688- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2689 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002690
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002691- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002692 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002693 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2694 interpreter executions, would fail.
2695
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002696- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002697 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002698 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002699
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002700Extension modules
2701-----------------
2702
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002703- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2704 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2705 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2706 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2707
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002708- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2709 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2710
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002711- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2712 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2713 and Greg Chapman.)
2714
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002715- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2716 recursively.
2717
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002718- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002719 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2720 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2721 leaks.
2722
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002723- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2724
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002725- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2726 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2727 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2728 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2729 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2730 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2731 #705836.
2732
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002733- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002734 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2735
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002736- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2737 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2738 See SF bug #692416.
2739
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002740- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2741 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2742
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002743- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2744 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2745 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002746
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002747- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002748 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2749 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2750
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002751- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2752 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2753 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2754 timeouts to work properly.
2755
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002756Library
2757-------
2758
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002759- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2760 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2761 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2762 future release.
2763
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002764- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2765 for querying platform dependent features.
2766
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002767- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002768
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002769- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2770 pickle protocol versions.
2771
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002772- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2773 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2774 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2775
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002776- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2777
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002778- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2779 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2780 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2781 modules.
2782
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002783- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2784 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2785 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2786
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002787- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2788 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2789
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002790- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2791 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2792 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2793
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002794- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002795 MS Office extensions.
2796
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002797- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2798 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2799
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002800- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2801 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2802
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002803- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2804 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2805 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2806 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2807 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2808 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2809
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002810- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2811 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2812 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002813
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002814- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2815 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2816 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2817
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002818- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2819
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002820- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2821 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2822 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2823
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002824Tools/Demos
2825-----------
2826
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002827- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2828 See the module docstring for details.
2829
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002830Build
2831-----
2832
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002833- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2834 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002835
2836C API
2837-----
2838
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002839- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2840
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002841- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2842 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2843 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2844
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002845- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2846 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002847
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002848 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2849 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2850 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002851
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002852- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002853 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2854
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002855- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2856 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2857 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002858
2859New platforms
2860-------------
2861
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002862None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002863
2864Tests
2865-----
2866
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002867- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2868 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002869
2870Windows
2871-------
2872
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002873- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2874 function.
2875
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002876- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2877 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002878
2879Mac
2880---
2881
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002882- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2883 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002884
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002885- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2886 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002887
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002888- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2889 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2890 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002891
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002892- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002893 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2894 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002895
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002896- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2897 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002898
2899
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002900What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2901=================================
2902
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002903*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002904
2905Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002906-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002907
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002908- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2909 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2910 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2911
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002912- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2913 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2914 (SF patch #664376.)
2915
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002916- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2917 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2918 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2919 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2920 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2921 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002922 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002923
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002924- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2925 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2926 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2927 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002928 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002929
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002930- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2931 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2932 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2933 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2934 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2935 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2936 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2937 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2938 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2939 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2940 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2941
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002942- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2943 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2944 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2945 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2946 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2947 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2948
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002949- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2950 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2951
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002952- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2953 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2954 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2955 case.)
2956
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002957- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2958 passed as unicode strings.
2959
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002960- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2961 See SF bug #683467.
2962
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002963- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2964 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2965
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002966- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2967
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002968- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2969
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002970- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2971 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2972 arguments.
2973
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002974- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2975 See SF bug #667147.
2976
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002977- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002978 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002979 See SF bug #676155.
2980
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002981- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002982 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002983 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2984 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2985 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2986 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2987 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2988 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002989
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002990Extension modules
2991-----------------
2992
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002993- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2994 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2995 tp_as_number pointer.
2996
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002997- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2998 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2999 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3000 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3001 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3002
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003003- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3004
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003005- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3006
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003007- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003008 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003009 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3010 patch #678531.)
3011
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003012- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3013 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3014
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003015- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3016 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3017
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003018- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3019
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003020- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3021 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3022 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3023
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003024- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3025
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003026- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3027 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3028
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003029- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003030
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003031- datetime changes:
3032
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003033 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3034
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003035 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3036 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3037 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3038 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3039 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3040 now.
3041
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003042 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003043 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3044 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003045
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003046 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003047 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003048 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3049 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3050 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3051 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003052
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003053 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3054 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3055 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003056 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3057
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003058 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3059 by a later example coded by Guido.
3060
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003061 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003062 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3063 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3064 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003065 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3066 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3067
3068 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3069 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3070 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3071 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3072 tzinfo subclass instance.
3073
3074 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3075 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3076 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3077 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3078 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3079 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3080 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3081 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003082
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003083 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3084 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3085 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3086 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3087 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003088 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3089
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003090 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003091
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003092 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3093 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3094 as a naive datetime object.
3095
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003096 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3097 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3098 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3099
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003100 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3101 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3102 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3103 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3104 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3105 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3106 comparison.
3107
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003108 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3109 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3110 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3111 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003112 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003113
3114 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003115
3116 and ::
3117
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003118 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3119
3120 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3121 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3122 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3123 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3124
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003125 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3126 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3127 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3128 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3129 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3130
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003131 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3132 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003133 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3134 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003135
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003136Library
3137-------
3138
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003139- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3140 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3141
3142- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3143 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3144 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3145 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3146 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3147 See PEP 307 for details.
3148
3149- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3150 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3151
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003152- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3153 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003154 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003155 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3156 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003157 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003158
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003159- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3160 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3161
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003162- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3163 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3164 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3165
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003166- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3167
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003168- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3169 exception.
3170
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003171- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3172 class.
3173
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003174- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3175 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3176 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3177
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003178- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3179 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3180
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003181- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003182 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3183 See SF bug #659228.
3184
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003185- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3186 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3187 See SF patch #651082.
3188
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003189- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003190
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003191- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3192 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3193
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003194- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003195 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003196
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003197- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3198 DOS paths from other platforms.
3199
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003200Tools/Demos
3201-----------
3202
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003203- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3204 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3205 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3206 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3207 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3208 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3209 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3210 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3211 example:
3212
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003213 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3214 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003215
3216 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3217
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003218
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003219Build
3220-----
3221
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003222- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3223 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3224 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003225 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3226
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003227 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3228
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003229- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3230 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3231 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3232 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3233 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3234 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3235 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3236 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3237 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3238
3239- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3240 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3241 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3242 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3243
3244- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3245 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3246
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003247C API
3248-----
3249
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003250- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3251 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003252
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003253- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3254 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3255 tp_as_number pointer.
3256
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003257- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3258 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3259 (SF #681367)
3260
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003261- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3262 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3263 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3264 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003265
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003266Tests
3267-----
3268
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003269- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003270 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3271 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3272 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3273 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3274 pydoc.)
3275
3276- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3277
3278- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003279
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003280Windows
3281-------
3282
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003283- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3284 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3285 time).
3286
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003287- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3288 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3289
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003290- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3291 release without strong cryptography.
3292
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003293- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003294 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003295
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003296- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3297 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3298
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003299Mac
3300---
3301
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003302- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3303 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003304
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003305- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3306 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3307 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003308
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003309- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3310 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003311
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003312- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3313 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3314 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3315 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003316
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003317- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003318 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3319 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3320 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003321
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003322
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003323What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003324=================================
3325
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003326*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003327
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003328Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003329--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003330
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003331- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3332
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003333- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3334 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003335 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003336 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003337 a different meaning than before.
3338
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003339- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003340 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003341 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003342
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003343- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003344 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003345 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003346
3347- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3348 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3349 and deallocation.
3350
3351- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3352 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3353
3354- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3355 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3356 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3357 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3358 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3359
3360- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3361 now detected by the garbage collector.
3362
3363- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3364 [SF bug 519621]
3365
3366- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3367 identifier.
3368
3369- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3370 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3371 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3372 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3373 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3374 [SF bug 563060]
3375
3376- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3377 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3378 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3379 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3380 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3381
3382- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3383 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3384 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3385
3386- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3387
3388- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3389 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3390 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3391 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3392 state of the slots would be lost.)
3393
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003394Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003395-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003396
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003397- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003398 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3399 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3400 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3401 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003402 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3403 Jython 2.1.
3404
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003405- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003406 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003407 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3408 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3409 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3410 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3411 these, see PEP 302.
3412
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003413- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3414 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3415 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3416
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003417- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3418 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3419 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3420
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003421- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3422 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3423 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3424
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003425- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3426 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3427 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3428 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3429 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3430 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3431 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3432 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3433 releases or implementations.
3434
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003435- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003436 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3437 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003438
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003439- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3440 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3441
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003442- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3443 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3444 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3445
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003446- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3447 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3448
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003449- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3450 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003451 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3452 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003453
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003454- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3455 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3456 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3457 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3458 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3459
3460 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3461 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3462 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3463 pattern.
3464
3465 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3466 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3467 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3468 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3469
3470 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3471 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3472 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3473 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3474 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3475 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3476
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003477- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3478 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3479 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3480 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3481 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3482 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3483 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3484 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003485
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003486- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3487 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3488 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3489 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3490 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003491 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3492 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3493 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3494 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3495 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3496 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3497 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003498
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003499- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3500 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3501
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003502- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3503 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3504 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3505 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3506 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3507 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3508 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3509 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3510 to Zack Weinberg!
3511
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003512- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3513 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3514 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3515 type. This has been fixed now.
3516
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003517- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3518 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3519 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3520
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003521- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3522 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3523 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3524 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3525 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3526 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3527 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3528 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003529 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003530
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003531- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3532 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3533 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003534
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003535- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3536 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3537 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3538 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3539 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3540 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3541 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3542 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003543 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003544 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3545 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3546
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003547- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3548 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3549 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3550 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3551 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3552 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3553 this.)
3554
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003555- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3556 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003557 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003558 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003559 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3560 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003561 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3562 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003563
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003564- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3565 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3566 currently running.
3567
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003568- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3569 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3570 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3571 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3572
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003573- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3574 as directory names.
3575
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003576- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3577 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3578
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003579- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3580 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3581
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003582- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003583 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3584 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003585
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003586- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3587 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3588 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3589 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3590 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3591
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003592- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3593 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3594 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3595 removed.
3596
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003597- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3598 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3599 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3600
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003601- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3602 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3603 to __debug__.
3604
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003605- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3606 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3607 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3608
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003609- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3610 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3611 deprecated now.
3612
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003613- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3614 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3615 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003616
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003617- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3618 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3619 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3620 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3621 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003622
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003623- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3624 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3625
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003626- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3627 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3628 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003629 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003630 is backward compatible.
3631
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003632- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3633 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3634 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3635 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3636 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3637
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003638- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3639 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3640 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3641 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3642 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3643 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003644
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003645- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3646 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3647
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003648- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3649 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3650
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003651- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3652 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3653 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3654 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3655 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3656
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003657- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3658 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3659 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3660
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003661- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003662 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3663
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003664- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3665 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3666 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003667
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003668- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3669 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3670
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003671- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3672 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3673 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3674
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003675- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3676
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003677Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003678-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003679
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003680- Added three operators to the operator module:
3681 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3682 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3683 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3684
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003685- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3686
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003687- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3688 archives.
3689
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003690- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3691 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3692 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3693
3694 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3695
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003696- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3697 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3698 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003699 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003700
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003701- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3702 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3703 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3704 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003705 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3706 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3707 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3708 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003709
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003710- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3711 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003712
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003713- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3714
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003715- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3716 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3717
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003718- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3719 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3720 supported.
3721
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003722- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3723
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003724- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3725 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003726
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003727- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3728 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3729
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003730- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3731
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003732- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3733 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3734
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003735- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3736 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3737 functions but callable type objects.
3738
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003739- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003740 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003741 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003742
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003743- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3744 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003745
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003746- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3747 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003748
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003749- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3750 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3751 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3752 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3753
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003754- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3755 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003756
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003757- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3758 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3759 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3760 and __imul__.
3761
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003762- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003763 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3764 is called.
3765
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003766- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3767 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3768 interpreter was compiled.
3769
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003770- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3771 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3772 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003773 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003774 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3775 1, not 2.
3776
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003777- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3778 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3779 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3780 limit.
3781
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003782- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3783 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3784 bug #623464.
3785
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003786- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3787 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3788 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3789 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3790
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003791Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003792-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003793
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003794- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3795
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003796- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3797 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3798 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3799 with Python 2.3a2.
3800
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003801- os.path exposes getctime.
3802
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003803- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003804 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003805 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003806 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003807 unit tests of floating point results.
3808
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003809- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3810 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3811 has been increased.
3812
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003813- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3814 executed.
3815
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003816- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3817 postinstallation script.
3818
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003819- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3820 test the current module.
3821
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003822- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003823 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3824 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3825 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3826 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3827
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003828- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003829 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003830 Ward's Optik package.
3831
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003832- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3833 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3834 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3835 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3836
3837- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3838 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003839 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003840
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003841- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3842 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3843 shelf are binary pickles.
3844
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003845- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3846 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3847
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003848- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3849 modules are iterators now.
3850
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003851- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3852 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3853 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3854 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3855 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3856 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003857
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003858- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3859 with their entity value.
3860
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003861- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3862
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003863- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3864 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003865
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003866- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3867 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003868 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003869
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003870- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3871 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3872 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3873 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3874 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3875 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3876 main():
3877
3878 import locale
3879 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3880
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003881- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3882 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3883
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003884- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3885 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3886 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3887 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3888 to the new standard.
3889
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003890- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3891 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3892 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3893 an extension to the database.
3894
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003895- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3896 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3897 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3898 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003899 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003900
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003901- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003902 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003903
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003904- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3905 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3906 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3907 bounded integers.
3908
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003909- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3910 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3911 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3912 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3913 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3914 in existence.
3915
3916 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3917 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3918 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3919 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3920 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3921 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3922
3923 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3924 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3925 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3926 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3927
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003928- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3929 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3930 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3931
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003932- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3933
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003934- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3935 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3936 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3937 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3938
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003939- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3940 argument.
3941
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003942- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3943 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3944 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3945 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3946 [SF patch 560794].
3947
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003948- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3949 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3950 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003951 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3952 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3953 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003954
3955- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3956 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003957
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003958- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3959 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3960 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3961 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003962
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003963- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3964 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3965 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3966 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3967 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3968
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003969- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003970
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003971- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3972
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003973- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3974 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3975 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3976 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3977 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3978 identical to None.
3979
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003980- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3981 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3982 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3983 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3984 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3985 results now.
3986
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003987- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3988 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3989
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003990- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3991 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3992 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3993 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3994 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3995 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3996 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3997 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3998
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003999- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4000
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004001- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4002 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4003
4004- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4005 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4006 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4007 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4008 and other systems.
4009
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004010- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4011 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4012 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4013 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 +00004014 work well with these.
4015
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004016- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4017
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004018- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004019 connections.
4020
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004021- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4022 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4023 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4024
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004025- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4026 sets
4027
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004028- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4029 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4030 name.
4031
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004032- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4033 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4034 passed in.
4035
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004036- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004037 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004038 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4039 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004040
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004041- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4042
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004043- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4044
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004045- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4046 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4047 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4048
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004049- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4050 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4051 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4052 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004053 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004054
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004055- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004056 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004057 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004058
4059- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4060 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4061 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4062
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004063- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004064 the value of its expression argument.
4065
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004066- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4067 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4068 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4069
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004070- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4071 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4072 skipstone browser was included.
4073
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004074- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4075 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4076
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004077Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004078-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004079
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004080- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4081 names in addition to accepting file names.
4082
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004083- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4084 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4085 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4086 still used and useful.)
4087
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004088- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4089 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4090 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4091 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004092
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004093- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4094 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4095 the generated binary.
4096
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004097Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004098-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004099
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004100- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4101
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004102- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4103 except in the hands of experts.
4104
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004105- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004106 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4107 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4108 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004109
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004110- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4111 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4112 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4113 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4114 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4115 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4116 builds.
4117
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004118- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4119 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4120 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4121 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4122 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4123 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4124 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4125 new type.
4126
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004127- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004128
4129 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4130 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4131 positive infinities.
4132
4133 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4134 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4135 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4136 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4137 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4138 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4139 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4140
4141 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4142
4143 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4144
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004145- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4146 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4147 size of the executable.
4148
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004149- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4150 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4151 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4152 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004153
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004154- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4155
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004156- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4157 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4158 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004159
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004160- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4161 well as Unix.
4162
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004163- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4164 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4165 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4166 modules in the README file for details.
4167
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004168C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004169-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004170
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004171- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4172 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004173 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004174 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004175 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004176
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004177- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4178 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4179 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4180 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4181 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4182 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004183 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004184 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4185 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4186 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4187 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4188 aligned.)
4189
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004190- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4191 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4192 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4193
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004194- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4195 level.
4196
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004197- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4198 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4199 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4200 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4201 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4202
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004203- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4204 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4205 code.
4206
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004207- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4208 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4209 adjusting for negative indices.
4210
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004211- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4212 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4213 object.
4214
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004215- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4216 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4217 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4218
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004219- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4220 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004221
4222- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4223
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004224- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4225 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4226 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4227 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4228
4229- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4230
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004231- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004232
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004233- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004234 without going through the buffer API.
4235
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004236- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004237
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004238- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4239 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4240 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4241 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4242
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004243- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4244 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4245
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004246- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004247 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4248
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004249New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004250-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004251
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004252- OpenVMS is now supported.
4253
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004254- AtheOS is now supported.
4255
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004256- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4257
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004258- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4259
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004260Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004261-----
4262
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004263- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4264 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4265 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004266
4267Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004268-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004269
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004270- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4271 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4272 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4273 bugs.
4274 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004275 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004276 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4277 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004278 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004279
4280- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004281 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004282
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004283- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4284 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4285
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004286- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4287 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004288 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004289 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4290
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004291- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4292 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4293 use files" uninstall option).
4294
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004295- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4296
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004297- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4298 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4299
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004300- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4301 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4302 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4303
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004304- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4305 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4306 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4307 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4308 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004309 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4310 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4311 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004312
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004313- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004314 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004315 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4316 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4317 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4318 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4319 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4320 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4321 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4322 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4323 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4324 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4325 work around.
4326
4327- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4328 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4329 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4330 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4331 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4332 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4333 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4334 specified with O_CREAT too).
4335
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004336Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337----
4338
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004339- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004340
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004341- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4342 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4343 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4344
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004345- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4346 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4347 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4348
4349- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4350 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4351 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4352 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4353 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4354 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4355 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4356 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004357
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004358- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4359 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4360 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004361
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004362- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4363 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4364 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4365 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4366 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004367
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004368- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4369 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4370 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004371
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004372- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4373 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004374
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004375- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4376 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4377 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4378 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4379 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004380
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004381- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4382 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4383 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4384
4385- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4386 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4387 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004388
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004389- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4390 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4391 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4392 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004393 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004394
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004395- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4396 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004397
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004398- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4399 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004400
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004401- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004402 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004403 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4404 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004405
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004406
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004407What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004408===============================
4409
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004410*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4411
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004412Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004413--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004414
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004415- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4416 with a custom metaclass.
4417
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004418Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004419-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004420
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004421- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4422 are proxies.
4423
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004424Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004425-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004426
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004427- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4428 very short strings.
4429
4430- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4431 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4432 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4433 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4434 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4435
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004436Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004437-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004438
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004439- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4440 close or delete time).
4441
4442- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4443 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4444
4445- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4446
4447- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004448 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004449
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004450Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004451-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004452
4453Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004454-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004455
4456C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004457-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004458
4459New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004461
4462Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004463-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004464
4465Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004466-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004467
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004468- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4469
4470- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4471 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4472
4473- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4474 deleted at process exit time.
4475
4476- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4477 in backslash.
4478
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004479Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004480----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004481
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004482- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4483 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4484 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4485
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004486
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004487What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004488===========================
4489
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004490*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4491
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004492Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004493--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004494
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004495- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4496 been extensively updated. See
4497
4498 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4499
4500 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4501
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004502- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4503 deleted!
4504
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004505- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4506 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4507 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4508 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4509 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4510
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004511- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4512
4513 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4514 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4515
4516 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4517 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4518 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4519 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4520 supported anyway.
4521
4522 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4523 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4524
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004525- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4526 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4527 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4528 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4529 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004530
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004531- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4532 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4533 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4534
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004535Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004536-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004537
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004538- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4539 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4540 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4541 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4542 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4543 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004544 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4545 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4546 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4547 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004548
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004549- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4550 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4551 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4552
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004553Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004554-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004555
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004556- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4557
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004558Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004560
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004561- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4562 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4563 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4564 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4565 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4566 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4567
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004568- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4569
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004570- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4571
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004572- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4573
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004574- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4575 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4576 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4577
4578- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4579
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004580Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004581-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004582
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004583- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4584 off a search on Google.
4585
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004586Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004587-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004588
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004589- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4590 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4591 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4592 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4593 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4594 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4595 other platforms should do likewise.
4596
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004597- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4598 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4599 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4600
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004601C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004602-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004603
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004604- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4605 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4606 producing key-value pairs.
4607
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004608- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004609 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004610 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4611 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4612 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4613 previously went unchallenged.
4614
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004615New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004616-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004617
4618Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004619-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004620
4621Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004622-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004623
4624Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004625----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004626
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004627- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4628 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004629
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004630- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4631 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4632 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4633 home.
4634
4635
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004636What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004637===========================
4638
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004639*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4640
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004641Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004642--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004643
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004644- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4645 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004646
4647 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004648 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004649
4650 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4651 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004652 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004653 This needs to be documented.
4654
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004655- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4656 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4657
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004658- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4659 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4660 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4661
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004662- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4663 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4664
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004665- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4666 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4667 class forbids it).
4668
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004669- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4670 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4671 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4672
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004673- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4674
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004675Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004676-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004677
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004678- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4679 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004680 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004681
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004682- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4683 (like 1 + '').
4684
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004685Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004686-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004687
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004688- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4689 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4690 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4691 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004692 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004693 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4694
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004695- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4696 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4697 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4698 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4699
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004700- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4701 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004702 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4703 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4704 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004705
4706- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4707 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004708
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004709- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4710 bytes on its input.
4711
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004712Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004713-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004714
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004715- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004716 convenience function.
4717
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004718- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4719 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4720 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004721 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4722 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4723 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4724 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4725 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4726 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004727
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004728- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4729 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4730 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4731 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4732
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004733- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4734 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4735 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4736
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004737- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4738 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4739 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4740 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4741
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004742- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4743 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004744 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004745 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4746 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4747 new -l and -e options.
4748
4749- statcache is now deprecated.
4750
4751- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4752 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004753 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004754 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4755 time properly taken into account.
4756
4757- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4758 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4759 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4760 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4761
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004762Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004763-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004764
4765Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004766-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004767
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004768- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4769 is built with libdb3 if available.
4770
4771- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4772
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004773C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004774-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004775
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004776- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4777 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4778 PySequence_Size().
4779
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004780- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4781
4782- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4783 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4784 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4785
4786- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4787 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4788
4789- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4790 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4791
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004792New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004793-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004794
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004795- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4796 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4797
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004798- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4799 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4800
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004801- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4802
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004803Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004804-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004805
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004806- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4807 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4808
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004809Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004810-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004811
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004812Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004813----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004814
4815- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4816 removed completely in the next release.
4817
4818- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4819 OSX.
4820
4821- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4822 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4823
4824- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4825
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004826
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004827What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004828===========================
4829
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004830*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4831
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004832Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004833--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004834
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004835- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004836 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004837 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004838 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4839 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004840 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4841 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004842 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4843 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004844
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004845- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4846 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4847
4848- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4849 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4850
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004851Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004852-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004853
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004854- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4855 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4856 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4857 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4858 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4859 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4860 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4861 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4862
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004863- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4864 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4865 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4866 example).
4867
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004868- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004869 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004870 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004871 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004872
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004873- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4874 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4875 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004876 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004877
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004878- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4879 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4880 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4881 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4882 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4883 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4884
4885 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4886
4887 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4888
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004889Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004890-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004891
4892- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4893
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004894- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4895
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004896- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4897 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004898
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004899- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4900 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4901 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4902 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4903 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4904 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004905 attributes.
4906
4907- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4908 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4909 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004910
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004911- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4912 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4913 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004914
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004915- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4916 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4917 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004918 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4919 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4920
4921- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4922 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004923
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004924Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004925-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004926
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004927- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4928 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4929
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004930- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4931 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4932 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4933 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4934
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004935- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4936 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4937 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4938 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4939
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004940 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4941 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4942 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4943 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4944 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4945 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4946 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4947 without losing information).
4948
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004949- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004950 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4951 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4952 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4953 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4954 module).
4955
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004956 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004957 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4958 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4959 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4960 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004961
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004962- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004963 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4964 encoding.
4965
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004966- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4967 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4968
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004969- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004970 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4971
4972- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4973 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4974 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4975 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4976
4977- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4978
4979- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4980 ON, and OFF.
4981
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004982- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4983 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4984
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004985Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004986-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004987
4988- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4989 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4990 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004991
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004992- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4993 been added: -X and -E.
4994
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004995Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004996-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004997
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004998- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4999 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5000
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005001C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005002-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005003
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005004- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5005 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5006 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5007 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5008 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5009
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005010- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5011 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5012 as long) arguments.
5013
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005014- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5015 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5016 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5017 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5018 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5019 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5020
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005021- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5022 input.
5023
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005024New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005025-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005026
5027Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005028-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005029
5030Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005031-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005032
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005033- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5034 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5035 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5036
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005037- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5038 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5039 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005040 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005041
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005042 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5043 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5044 import signal
5045 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005046
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005047 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005048 while 1:
5049 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005050 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005051 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5052 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5053 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5054 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005055
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005056
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005057What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5058===========================
5059
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005060*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5061
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005062Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005063--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005064
5065- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5066 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5067 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5068
5069- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5070 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5071 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5072 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5073 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5074 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5075 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005076
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005077- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005078 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005079 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5080 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5081 associate a docstring with a property.
5082
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005083- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5084 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5085 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5086 other built-in object types.
5087
5088- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5089 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5090 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5091 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5092 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5093
5094- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5095 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5096
5097- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5098 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005099 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005100 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5101 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5102 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5103 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5104 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5105
5106- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5107 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5108 class.
5109
5110- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5111 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5112 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5113 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5114
5115- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5116 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5117 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5118 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5119
5120- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5121 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5122
5123- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5124 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5125 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5126 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5127 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005128 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005129 with the same value as s.
5130
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005131- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5132
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005133Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005134----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005135
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005136- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5137
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005138- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5139 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5140 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5141 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5142 objects.
5143
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005144- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5145 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005146 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5147 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5148
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005149- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5150 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5151 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5152
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005153Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005154-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005155
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005156- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5157 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5158 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5159 by the instances.
5160
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005161- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5162 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5163 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5164
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005165- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5166 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5167 before the entire comparison is complete.
5168
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005169- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5170 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5171 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5172
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005173- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5174 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5175 getwriter().
5176
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005177- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5178 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5179
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005180- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005181 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5182 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5183
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005184- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5185 iterable object.
5186
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005187- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5188 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005189
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005190- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5191 authentication.
5192
5193- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5194 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005195
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005196- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005197 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5198 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5199 a sample driver.)
5200
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005201Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005202-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005203
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005204- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5205 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5206 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5207 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5208 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5209 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5210 kernel has large file support.
5211
5212- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5213 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5214 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5215 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5216 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5217
5218- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5219 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5220 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5221
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005222C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005223-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005224
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005225- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5226 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5227
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005228New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005229-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005230
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005231- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5232 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5233
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005234Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005235-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005236
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005237- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5238 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5239 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5240 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5241 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5242
5243- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5244 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5245 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5246 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5247
5248- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5249 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5250
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005251Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005252-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005253
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005254- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005255 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5256 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005257
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005258
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005259What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5260===========================
5261
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005262*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5263
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005264Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005265----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005266
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005267- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5268 big to represent as a C double.
5269
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005270- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5271 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5272 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5273 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5274 restriction).
5275
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005276- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5277 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5278 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5279 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5280 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5281
5282 >>> dir([])
5283 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5284 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5285 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5286 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5287 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5288 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5289 'reverse', 'sort']
5290
5291 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5292
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005293- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005294 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5295 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5296 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5297 OverflowError exception.
5298
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005299- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005300 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005301 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5302 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5303 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5304 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5305 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005306 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005307 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5308 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5309
5310 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5311 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5312 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5313 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005314
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005315- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005316 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5317 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5318 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5319 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5320 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5321 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5322 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5323 once it is created.
5324
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005325- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5326 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5327 (key, value) pairs.
5328
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005329- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005330 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5331 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5332
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005333- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5334 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5335 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5336 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5337 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005338
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005339- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005340 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5341 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5342
5343 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5344
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005345- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005346 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5347
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005348Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005349-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005350
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005351- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005352 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5353 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005354
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005355- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5356 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5357 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5358 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5359 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5360 in this area anymore).
5361
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005362- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5363 threading.Timer.
5364
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005365- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5366 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5367
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005368- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005369 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5370
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005371- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005372 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5373 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5374 converted to Python longs.
5375
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005376- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005377 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5378
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005379- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5380 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5381 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5382
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005383Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005384-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005385
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005386- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5387 division operators as per PEP 238.
5388
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005389Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005390-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005391
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005392- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5393 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5394 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5395 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5396
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005397C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005398-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005399
5400- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005401
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005402- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5403 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005404 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005405
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005406 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5407 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005408 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005409 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005410
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005411- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005412 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5413 module:
5414
5415 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005416
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005417 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5418 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005419
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005420 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5421 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005422
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005423 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5424
5425 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5426
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005427- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005428 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5429 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5430 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005431
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005432New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005433-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005434
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005435- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5436 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5437 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5438 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5439 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005440
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005441Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005442-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005443
5444Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005445-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005446
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005447- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5448 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5449 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5450 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005451 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5452 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5453 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5454 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5455 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005456
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005457- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005458 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5459
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005460
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005461What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5462===========================
5463
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005464*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5465
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005466Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005467-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005468
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005469- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5470 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5471
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005472- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5473 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5474 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005475
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005476- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5477 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5478 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5479 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005480
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005481- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5482
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005483- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005484
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005485Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005486-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005487
5488- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005489 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005490 the module docstring for details.
5491
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005492Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005493-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005494
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005495- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005496 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5497 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5498 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005499
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005500- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5501 Nick Mathewson.
5502
5503Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005504----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005505
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005506- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5507 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5508 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5509 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5510 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5511 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5512 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5513 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5514
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005515- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5516 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5517 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5518 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5519
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005520- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5521 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5522 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5523 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5524 come a long way).
5525
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005526- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5527 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5528 write filters for these warnings).
5529
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005530- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5531 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5532 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5533 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5534 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5535
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005536- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5537 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5538 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5539 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5540 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5541 older distribution.
5542
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005543Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005544-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005545
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005546- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5547 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005548 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005549
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005550- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5551 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5552 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5553
5554- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5555
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005556- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5557
5558- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5559
5560- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5561
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005562- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005563
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005564- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5565
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005566New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005567-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005568
5569C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005570-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005571
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005572- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5573 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5574 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5575 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5576 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5577 against buffer overruns.
5578
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005579- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005580 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5581 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005582 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5583 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5584 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5585
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005586- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5587 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5588 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5589 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5590 deprecated.
5591
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005592Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005593-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005594
5595- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5596 relevant is found.
5597
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005598
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005599What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005600===========================
5601
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005602*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5603
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005604Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005605----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005606
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005607- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5608 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5609 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5610 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5611 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5612 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5613 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5614 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005615 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005616 repaired.
5617
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005618- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005619 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005620 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5621 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5622 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5623 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5624 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5625 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5626 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5627 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5628
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005629- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5630 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5631 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5632 leading BMO character).
5633
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005634- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5635 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5636 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5637
5638 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5639 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5640 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005641
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005642 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5643 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5644 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5645 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5646 for various simple to use conversions.
5647
5648 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5649 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5650
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005651 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5652 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5653 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5654 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5655 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5656 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5657 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5658 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5659 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5660 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5661 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5662 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5663 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5664 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5665 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005666
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005667- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5668 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5669 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005670 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005671 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005672
5673 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005674 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5675 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5676 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5677 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5678 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005679 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5680 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005681
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005682 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5683 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5684 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005685 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005686
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005687- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5688 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5689 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5690 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5691 floating arithmetic,
5692
5693 x = 9007199254740992.0
5694 print long(x)
5695
5696 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5697 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5698 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5699 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5700 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5701 functions are of good quality).
5702
5703 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5704 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5705 algorithms to break.
5706
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005707- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5708 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5709 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5710 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5711 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5712 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5713 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5714 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5715 order.
5716
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005717- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5718 operation along the most common code paths.
5719
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005720- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5721 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5722
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005723- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5724 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5725 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5726 {}.update(UserDict())
5727
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005728- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5729 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5730 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5731 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5732 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5733 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5734 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5735 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5736
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005737- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005738 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005739
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005740 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005741 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5742 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005743 join() method of strings
5744 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005745 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5746 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005747 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005748 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005749
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005750- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5751 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5752
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005753- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5754 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5755
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005756- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5757 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5758 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5759 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5760
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005761- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5762 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005763 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005764 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5765 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005766
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005767- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5768
5769
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005770Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005771-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005772
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005773- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005774 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005775 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5776 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5777
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005778- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5779 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5780
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005781- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5782 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5783 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5784 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5785
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005786- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5787 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5788 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5789
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005790- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5791
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005792- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5793
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005794- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5795 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5796 that are still imported into string.py).
5797
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005798- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5799
5800- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5801 Now it does.
5802
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005803- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5804
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005805- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5806 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5807 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5808 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5809 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005810 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5811 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005812
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005813- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5814 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5815 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5816 'help(object)'.
5817
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005818Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005819-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005820
5821- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005822 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005823 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5824 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5825
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005826- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005827 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5828 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005829
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005830C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005831-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005832
5833- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5834 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005835
5836----
5837
5838**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**