blob: 1706874c24da2a94b5a381039d10a1e92ce06df9 [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
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000013- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
14
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000015- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
16 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error)
17
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000018- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
19
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000020- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
21 returning None.
22
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000023- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
24 ('\') with a specific error message.
25
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000026- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
27
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000028- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
29 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
30
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000031- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000032 an ferror() call.
33
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000034- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
35 list.sort().
36
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000037- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
38 (2+3) --> (5).
39
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000040- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
41
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000042- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
43 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000044
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000045- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
46 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
47 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
48
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000049Extension Modules
50-----------------
51
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +000052- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
53
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +000054- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
55 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
56 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
57
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +000058- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
59
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +000060- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
61 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
62
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +000063- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
64 file size.
65
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000066- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
67
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000068- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
69 {remove_history,replace_history}
70
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000071- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
72 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000073
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000074- stat_float_times is now True.
75
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000076- array.array objects are now picklable.
77
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000078- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
79 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
80
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000081- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
82 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
83 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
84
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000085- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
86 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000087
88Library
89-------
90
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +000091- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
92 files to PyPI.
93
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +000094- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
95 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
96
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +000097- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
98 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
99
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000100- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
101
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000102- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
103 to build.
104
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000105- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
106 symbolic links on Windows.
107
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000108- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
109 profile.py if available.
110
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000111- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
112
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000113- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
114 in LWPCookieJar.
115
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000116- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
117
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000118- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
119
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000120- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
121
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000122- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
123
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000124- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
125
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000126- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
127
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000128- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
129
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000130- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
131
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000132- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
133 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
134 be exploited in various ways.
135
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000136- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
137
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000138- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
139
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000140- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
141
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000142- Enhancements to the csv module:
143
144 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
145 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
146 PEP 305.
147 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
148 reporting.
149 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
150 dictates.
151 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000152 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000153 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000154 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
155 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000156 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
157 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000158 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000159 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
160 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
161 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
162 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
163 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
164 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
165 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
166 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
167 without first creating a dialect class.
168 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
169 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
170 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000171 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000172 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
173 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000174 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
175 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
176 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
177 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000178 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
179 This has been fixed.
180
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000181- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
182 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
183 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
184 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
185
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000186- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
187
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000188- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
189 (Bug #951915).
190
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000191- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
192 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
193 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
194 encoding alias table
195
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000196- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
197
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000198- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
199 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
200
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000201- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
202
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000203- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
204
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000205- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
206
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000207- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
208
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000209- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
210
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000211- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
212 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
213 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
214
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000215- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000216 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000217
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000218- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
219 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
220 tokenizer with very long source lines.
221
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000222- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
223 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
224
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000225- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
226 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000227
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000228- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
229 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
230
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000231- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
232 correctly.
233
234
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000235Build
236-----
237
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000238- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
239
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000240- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
241 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
242
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000243- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
244 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
245 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
246 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
247 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
248 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
249 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
250 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
251
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000252- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
253 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
254 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
255 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
256
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000257
258C API
259-----
260
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000261- Removed PyRange_New().
262
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000263
264Tests
265-----
266
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000267- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000268
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000269
270Documentation
271-------------
272
273- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
274 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
275 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
276
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000277Mac
278---
279
280
281
282Tools/Demos
283-----------
284
285
286
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000287What's New in Python 2.4 final?
288===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000289
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000290*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000291
292Core and builtins
293-----------------
294
295- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
296 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
297 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
298
299
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000300What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
301==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000302
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000303*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000304
305Core and builtins
306-----------------
307
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000308- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
309 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
310 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
311
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000312
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000313Library
314-------
315
316- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
317 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
318 raised is re-raised.
319
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000320- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
321 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
322
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000323- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
324 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
325 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
326 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
327 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
328 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
329 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
330 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
331 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
332 by the slice are recomputed now.
333
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000334- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000335
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000336Build
337-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000338
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000339- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
340 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
341 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000342
343C API
344-----
345
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000346- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
347
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000348
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000349What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
350================================
351
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000352*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000353
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000354License
355-------
356
357The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
358is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
359changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
360Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
361intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
362durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
363the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
364License::
365
366 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
367
368says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
369to Python 2.1.1.
370
371The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
372License Version 2.
373
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000374Core and builtins
375-----------------
376
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000377- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
378 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
379 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
380 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
381 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
382 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
383 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
384 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
385 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
386 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
387
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000388- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000389
390Extension Modules
391-----------------
392
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000393- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
394 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
395 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
396 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000397
398Library
399-------
400
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000401- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
402 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
403 returned.
404
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000405- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
406
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000407- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
408 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
409
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000410- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
411
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000412- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
413 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000414
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000415- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
416
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000417- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
418
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000419- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000420 the source code is updated and reloaded.
421
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000422Build
423-----
424
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000425- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000426
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000427What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
428================================
429
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000430*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000431
432Core and builtins
433-----------------
434
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000435- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000436 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
437
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000438- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
439 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
440 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
441 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
442
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000443- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
444 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
445
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000446- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
447 constant.
448
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000449- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
450 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
451 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
452 large), and to anomalies such as
453 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
454 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
455 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
456 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000457
458Extension modules
459-----------------
460
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000461- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
462 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000463 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
464 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
465 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000466
467Library
468-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000469
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000470- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000471 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000472 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
473 --swig-cpp.
474
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000475- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
476 it is set.
477
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000478- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000479
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000480- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
481 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
482 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
483 Closes bug #1039270.
484
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000485- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000486
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000487 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000488 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
489 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
490 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
491 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
492 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
493 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
494 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
495 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
496 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
497 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
498 + Updates to documentation.
499
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000500- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
501 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
502 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
503 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
504
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000505- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000506
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000507- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
508 applications should use the getmember function.
509
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000510- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
511
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000512- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
513 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
514 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
515 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
516 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
517 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
518 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
519 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
520 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
521
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000522- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
523 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000524 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000525
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000526- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
527 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
528 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
529 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
530 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
531 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
532 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
533 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000534
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000535- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
536 the new public features (of which there are many).
537
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000538- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000539 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
540 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
541 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
542 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000543 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000544
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000545- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
546
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000547- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
548 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
549 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
550 options.
551
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000552- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
553 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
554 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
555 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
556 conditions under which non-string values work.
557
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000558Build
559-----
560
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000561- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
562 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
563 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
564
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000565- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
566 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
567 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
568 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
569 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000570
571C API
572-----
573
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000574- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
575 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
576
577- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
578
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000579- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
580 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
581 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
582 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
583 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
584 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
585 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
586 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
587 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
588
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000589- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
590
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000591- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
592 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
593 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000594
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000595Tests
596-----
597
598- test__locale ported to unittest
599
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000600Mac
601---
602
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000603- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
604 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
605 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000606
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000607Tools/Demos
608-----------
609
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000610- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
611 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
612 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
613 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
614 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000615
616
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000617What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
618=================================
619
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000620*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000621
622Core and builtins
623-----------------
624
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000625- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000626 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
627
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000628- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
629 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
630 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
631 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
632 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
633 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
634 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
635 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000636 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
637 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
638 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
639 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
640 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000641
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000642- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
643 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
644 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
645 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
646 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
647
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000648- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
649
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000650- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
651 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
652
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000653- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
654 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
655 modified the list.
656
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000657- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
658 functions is now writable.
659
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000660- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
661 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
662 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
663 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
664
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000665- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
666 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
667 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
668 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
669 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000670
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000671- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
672 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
673
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000674Extension modules
675-----------------
676
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000677- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
678
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000679- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
680 data.
681
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000682- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
683 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
684 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
685 supposed to have been truncated away.
686
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000687- Added socket.socketpair().
688
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000689- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
690 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
691
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000692- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000693 versions of Python, have now been removed.
694
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000695Library
696-------
697
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000698- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000699 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000700
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000701- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
702 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
703
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000704- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
705 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
706
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000707- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
708
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000709- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
710 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000711
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000712- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
713 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
714
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000715- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
716
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000717- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
718
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000719- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
720
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000721- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
722 Percivall.
723
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000724- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
725 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
726
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000727- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
728 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
729 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000730 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000731
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000732- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
733 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
734 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
735 and exponent.
736
737- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
738
739- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
740 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
741 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
742
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000743- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
744 to the readline module.
745
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000746- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000747 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
748 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000749
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000750- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
751 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
752 contains symlinks.
753
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000754- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
755 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
756
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000757- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
758 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
759 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
760
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000761- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
762 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
763 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
764 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
765 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
766 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
767 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
768 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
769 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
770 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
771 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
772 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
773 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
774
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000775- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
776
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000777Tools/Demos
778-----------
779
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000780- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
781 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
782
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000783- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
784
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000785Build
786-----
787
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000788- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
789 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
790 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
791 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
792 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
793 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
794 plans to do so.
795
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000796- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
797 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
798
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000799- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
800 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
801
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000802- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
803 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
804
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000805- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
806 GNU/k*BSD systems.
807
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000808- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
809 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
810
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000811C API
812-----
813
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000814..
815
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000816Documentation
817-------------
818
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000819- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
820 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
821
822- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
823 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
824 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000825
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000826New platforms
827-------------
828
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000829- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
830
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000831Tests
832-----
833
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000834..
835
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000836Windows
837-------
838
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000839- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
840 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
841 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
842 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
843 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
844 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
845 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
846 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
847 the problem.
848
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000849Mac
850---
851
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000852..
853
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000854
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000855What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
856=================================
857
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000858*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000859
860Core and builtins
861-----------------
862
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000863- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
864 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
865 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
866 sensitive code.
867
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000868- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000869 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000870
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000871 @staticmethod
872 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000873
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000874 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000875
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000876- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
877 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
878 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
879 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
880 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
881 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
882 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
883 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
884 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
885 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
886 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
887
888 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
889 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
890 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
891 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
892 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
893 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
894 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
895
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000896- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
897 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
898
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000899- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000900 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000901
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000902- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000903 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000904 which was missing for no apparent reason.
905
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000906- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000907 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
908 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
909
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000910- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
911 types that support garbage collection.
912
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000913- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
914
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000915- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
916 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
917 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
918 Jython.
919
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000920- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
921
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000922- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
923 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
924
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000925- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
926 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
927 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000928
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000929- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
930 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
931 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
932
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000933Extension modules
934-----------------
935
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000936- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
937
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000938Library
939-------
940
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000941- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
942 TIS-620
943
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000944- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
945 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
946 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
947 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
948 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
949 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
950 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
951 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
952 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
953 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
954
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000955- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
956
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000957- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
958 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
959 same as when the argument is omitted).
960 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
961
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000962- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
963
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000964- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
965 schemes are offered.
966
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000967- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
968
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000969- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
970 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
971 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
972
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000973- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
974
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000975- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
976 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
977
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000978- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
979 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
980 when dummy_threading is being used.
981
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000982- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
983 from a tarfile.
984
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000985- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000986 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000987
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000988- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
989 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
990 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
991 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
992
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000993- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
994 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
995
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000996- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
997 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
998 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
999 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1000 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1001 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1002 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1003 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1004 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1005 by some other method in progress).
1006
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001007- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1008 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1009 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001010
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001011- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1012
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001013- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1014 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1015 AM Kuchling.
1016
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001017- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1018 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1019 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1020
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001021- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1022 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1023 instead of unsigned.
1024
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001025- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001026 no longer part of the public API.
1027
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001028- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1029 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1030 string methods of the same name).
1031
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001032- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001033 SF patch 945642.
1034
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001035- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1036
1037 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1038
1039 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1040 DocTestSuites.
1041
1042- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1043 that provide thread-local data.
1044
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001045- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1046 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1047
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001048- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1049
1050- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1051 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1052 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1053
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001054- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1055
1056 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1057 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1058 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001059
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001060 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1061 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1062 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1063 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1064
1065 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1066 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1067
1068 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1069 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1070 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1071 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1072
1073 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1074 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1075 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1076 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1077 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1078
1079 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1080 wrapping help output.
1081
1082 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1083 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1084 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001085
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001086C API
1087-----
1088
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001089- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1090 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1091 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1092 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1093 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1094 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1095 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1096 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1097 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1098 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1099 its visible semantics have not changed.
1100
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001101- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1102 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1103
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001104Documentation
1105-------------
1106
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001107- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001108
1109 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001110 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001111
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001112 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001113
1114 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1115
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001116- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001117
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001118Tests
1119-----
1120
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001121- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001122 platforms that use the Makefile.
1123
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001124- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1125 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1126 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1127
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001128
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001129What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1130=================================
1131
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001132*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001133
1134Core and builtins
1135-----------------
1136
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001137- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1138 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1139 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1140 objects now (one object instead of three).
1141
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001142- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1143 Windows DLLs.
1144
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001145- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1146 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001147
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001148- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1149 a new .pyc magic.
1150
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001151- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1152 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1153 be there.
1154
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001155- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1156 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1157 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1158
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001159- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1160 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1161 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1162
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001163- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1164
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001165- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1166 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1167 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001168
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001169- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1170 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1171
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001172- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1173
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001174- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001175 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001176
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001177- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1178
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001179- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1180
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001181- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1182 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1183
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001184- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1185 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1186 Fixes bug #858016 .
1187
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001188- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1189 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1190 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1191
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001192- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1193 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1194 improves their performance (about 35%).
1195
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001196- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1197 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1198 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1199
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001200- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1201 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1202 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1203 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1204
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001205- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1206 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001207 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001208 length is not known).
1209
1210- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1211 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001212 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1213 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001214 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1215
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001216- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1217 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1218
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001219- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1220 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1221 keyword arguments.
1222
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001223- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1224 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1225 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1226
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001227- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1228 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1229 cases.
1230
1231- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1232 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1233 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1234 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1235 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1236 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1237 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1238 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1239 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1240 a release build.
1241
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001242- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1243 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1244
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001245- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001246 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001247
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001248- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1249 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1250 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1251 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1252 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1253 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1254 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1255 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1256 destroyed.
1257
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001258- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1259 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1260 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1261 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1262 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1263 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1264 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1265 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1266
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001267- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1268 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1269 character other than a space.
1270
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001271- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1272 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1273 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1274 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1275 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1276 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1277 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1278 attributes with the same name.
1279
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001280- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1281 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1282 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1283 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1284 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1285 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1286 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1287 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1288 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1289 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1290 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1291 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1292 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1293 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001294
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001295- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1296 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1297 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1298 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1299 This has been repaired.
1300
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001301- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1302
1303- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1304
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001305- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1306 over a sequence.
1307
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001308- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001309 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001310
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001311- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1312
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001313- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1314 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1315 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1316 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1317 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1318 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1319 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1320 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1321
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001322- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1323 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1324 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1325
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001326- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1327 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1328 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1329 freelist.
1330
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001331- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1332 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1333
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001334- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1335 number.
1336
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001337- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1338 a TypeError exception.
1339
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001340- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1341 820195.
1342
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001343- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1344 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1345 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1346
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001347- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001348 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1349 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001350
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001351- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1352 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1353 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1354
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001355- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1356 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001357 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001358
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001359- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001360 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1361 the first call.
1362
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001363
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001364Extension modules
1365-----------------
1366
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001367- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1368 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1369
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001370- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1371 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1372 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1373 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1374 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1375 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1376 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001377
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001378- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1379
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001380- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1381
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001382- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1383 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1384
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001385- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1386 fewer false positives.
1387
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001388- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1389 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1390
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001391- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001392 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1393
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001394- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001395 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001396 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001397 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1398 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001399
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001400- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1401 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1402 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1403 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1404
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001405- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1406 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1407 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1408 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1409 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1410 #897625.
1411
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001412- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1413 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1414
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001415- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1416 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1417 and pops on either side of the deque.
1418
1419- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1420 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1421
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001422- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1423 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1424 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1425 other functions that expect a function argument.
1426
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001427- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1428
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001429- os.getsid was added.
1430
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001431- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1432 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1433 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1434
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001435- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1436
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001437- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1438
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001439- readline.clear_history was added.
1440
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001441- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1442
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001443- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1444
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001445- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1446
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001447- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1448
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001449- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1450
1451- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1452
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001453- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1454
1455- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1456
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001457- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1458 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1459 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1460
1461- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1462 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1463 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1464 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1465 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1466 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1467 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1468
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001469- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1470 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1471 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1472 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001473
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001474- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001475 iterators from a single iterable.
1476
1477- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1478 of raising a TypeError exception.
1479
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001480- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1481 as parameter.
1482
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001483Library
1484-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001485
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001486- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1487 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1488 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001489
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001490- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1491 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1492 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001493
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001494- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001495
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001496- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1497 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001498
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001499- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1500 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1501
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001502- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1503
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001504- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001505 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001506
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001507- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001508 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001509
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001510- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1511
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001512- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1513 on cygwin and mingw32.
1514
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001515- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1516
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001517- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1518 module.
1519
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001520- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1521 installation scheme for all platforms.
1522
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001523- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001524 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001525
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001526- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1527 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1528 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1529
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001530- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1531 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1532 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1533
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001534- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1535
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001536- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1537
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001538- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1539 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1540
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001541- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1542 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1543 type pattern with the same value exists.
1544
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001545- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1546 when run from the command prompt).
1547
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001548- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1549 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1550
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001551- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1552 default sort).
1553
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001554- Added global runctx function to profile module
1555
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001556- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1557
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001558- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1559
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001560- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1561
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001562- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001563 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1564 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1565 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1566 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1567 accordingly.
1568
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001569- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1570 decoding standards.
1571
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001572- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1573 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1574 called for all requests.
1575
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001576- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1577 they are passed to the compiler.
1578
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001579- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1580 indent, width and depth.
1581
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001582- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1583 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1584
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001585- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1586 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1587
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001588- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1589
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001590- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1591
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001592- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1593
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001594- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1595 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1596
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001597- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001598 for better performance.
1599
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001600- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001601
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001602- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1603 a string).
1604
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001605- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1606
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001607- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1608
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001609- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1610
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001611- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1612
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001613- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1614 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1615 list of fieldnames.
1616
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001617- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1618 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1619
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001620- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1621
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001622- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1623 empty lists.
1624
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001625- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1626 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1627 and shelves.
1628
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001629- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1630 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1631
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001632- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001633 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1634 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001635
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001636- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1637 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001638 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001639
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001640- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001641 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1642 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1643
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001644- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1645 and removed in Py2.4.
1646
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001647- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1648
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001649- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1650
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001651Tools/Demos
1652-----------
1653
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001654- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1655 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1656
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001657- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1658
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001659- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1660 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1661 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1662 destination in situations where both files are given.
1663
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001664- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1665 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1666 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1667 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1668
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001669- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1670
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001671- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1672 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1673 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1674 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1675 now.
1676
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001677- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1678 in effect
1679
1680- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1681 C-c C-h
1682
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001683- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1684 -d option was given.
1685
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001686Build
1687-----
1688
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001689- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1690 build under OS X.
1691
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001692- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1693 --enable-profiling.
1694
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001695- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1696 is configured --with-tsc.
1697
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001698- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1699 on AMD64.
1700
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001701- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1702 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1703
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001704- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1705 removed.
1706
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001707- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1708 supported (see PEP 11).
1709
1710- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1711
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001712- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1713
1714- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1715 (see PEP 11).
1716
1717- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1718 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1719
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001720C API
1721-----
1722
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001723- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1724 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1725 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1726
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001727- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1728 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1729 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1730 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1731
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001732- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1733 generator objects.
1734
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001735- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1736 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001737 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1738 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001739
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001740- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1741 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1742
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001743- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1744 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1745 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1746 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1747 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1748
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001749- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1750 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1751 about 10% faster.
1752
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001753- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1754 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1755
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001756- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1757 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1758 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1759 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1760
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001761Windows
1762-------
1763
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001764- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1765 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1766 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1767 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1768
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001769- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1770 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1771 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1772
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001773
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001774What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1775===============================
1776
1777*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1778
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001779IDLE
1780----
1781
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001782- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1783 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1784 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1785 context-menu actions.
1786
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001787- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1788 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1789 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1790 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1791 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1792 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1793 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1794 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1795 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1796
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001797
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001798What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1799=============================================
1800
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001801*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001802
1803Core and builtins
1804-----------------
1805
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001806- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001807 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001808 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1809
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001810Extension modules
1811-----------------
1812
1813- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1814 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1815 than once. This has been fixed.
1816
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001817- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1818 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1819 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1820 call.
1821
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001822- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1823
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001824Library
1825-------
1826
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001827- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1828 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1829
1830- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1831 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1832 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1833 restored.
1834
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001835IDLE
1836----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001837
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001838- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001839
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001840Build
1841-----
1842
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001843- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1844 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1845
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001846C API
1847-----
1848
1849Windows
1850-------
1851
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001852- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1853 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1854
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001855- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1856
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001857Mac
1858---
1859
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001860- Various fixes to pimp.
1861
1862- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1863
1864- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1865 more problems than it solves.
1866
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001867
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001868What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1869=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001870
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001871*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1872
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001873Core and builtins
1874-----------------
1875
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001876- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1877 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1878
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001879- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1880 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001881 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001882
1883- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1884 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1885 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001886 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001887
1888- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1889 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001890
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001891- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1892 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1893 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1894
1895- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001896 770247.
1897
1898- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001899
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001900Extension modules
1901-----------------
1902
1903- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1904 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1905
1906- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1907
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001908- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1909
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001910- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1911 contained within the _strptime module.
1912
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001913- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1914 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1915
1916- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001917 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1918
1919- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1920 the find_class attribute, if present.
1921
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001922- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001923
1924 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1925 (SF bug 763298).
1926
1927 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001928 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1929 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1930 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001931
1932 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1933
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001934Library
1935-------
1936
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001937- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1938
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001939- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1940 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1941 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1942 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1943 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1944 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1945 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1946 or Tester().
1947
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001948- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1949 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1950 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1951 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1952 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1953 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1954 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1955 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1956 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001957
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001958 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001959
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001960- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1961 weren't before was an oversight.
1962
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001963- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1964 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1965
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001966- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1967 when there are no lines.
1968
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001969- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1970 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1971
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001972- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1973 to child processes.
1974
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001975- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1976
1977- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1978
1979- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1980 xmlrpclib.
1981
1982- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1983 responses.
1984
1985- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1986 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1987
1988- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1989 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1990 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1991
1992- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1993 used as patterns.
1994
1995- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1996 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1997 than Tk 8.3.
1998
1999- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2000
2001- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002002
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002003Tools/Demos
2004-----------
2005
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002006- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2007
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002008- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2009
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002010- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002011
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002012Build
2013-----
2014
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002015- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2016
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002017- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2018
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002019- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2020 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002021
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002022- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2023 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2024 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002025
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002026C API
2027-----
2028
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002029- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2030 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2031
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002032Windows
2033-------
2034
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002035- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2036 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2037 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2038 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2039 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2040 Python exception ::
2041
2042 thread.error: can't start new thread
2043
2044 is raised now.
2045
2046- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2047 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2048 instead of from DLL teardown.
2049
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002050Mac
2051---
2052
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002053- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002054 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002055 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2056 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2057 the executable in the bundle.
2058
2059- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002060
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002061- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2062
2063- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2064 on Panther.
2065
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002066What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2067================================
2068
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002069*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002070
2071Core and builtins
2072-----------------
2073
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002074- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2075 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2076 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2077 with the -i option.
2078
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002079- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2080 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2081
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002082- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2083 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2084
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002085- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2086 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2087 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2088 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2089 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2090 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2091 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2092 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2093 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2094 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2095 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2096 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2097 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002098
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002099- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2100 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2101 embedded in a lambda expression.
2102
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002103- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2104 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2105 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2106 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2107 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2108
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002109- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2110 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2111 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2112
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002113- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2114 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2115
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002116- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2117 It's writable again.
2118
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002119- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2120 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2121 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002122 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002123
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002124- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2125 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2126 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2127
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002128Extension modules
2129-----------------
2130
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002131- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2132 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2133
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002134- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2135 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2136 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2137 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2138
2139- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2140 collection.
2141
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002142- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2143 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2144 unique within a single program run.
2145
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002146- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2147 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2148
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002149- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2150 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2151
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002152- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2153 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002154
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002155- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2156
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002157- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2158 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2159
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002160- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2161 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2162 for many BSD-derived systems.
2163
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002164
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002165Library
2166-------
2167
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002168- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2169 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2170 primary ones:
2171
2172 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2173 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2174 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2175
2176 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2177 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2178 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2179 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2180 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2181 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2182
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002183- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2184 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2185 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2186 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2187 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2188 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2189 argument.
2190
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002191- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2192 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2193 in the archive.
2194
2195- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2196 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2197
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002198- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2199 569574).
2200
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002201- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2202 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2203 no more.
2204
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002205- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2206 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2207 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2208 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2209 code coverage.
2210
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002211- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2212 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2213 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002214 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2215 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002216
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002217- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2218 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2219 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002220 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002221
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002222- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2223
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002224- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2225 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2226 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2227 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2228
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002229- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2230 handling.
2231
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002232- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2233 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2234
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002235- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2236 in socket.py.
2237
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002238- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2239
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002240- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2241 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2242 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2243 opener with proxy support.
2244
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002245- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2246
2247- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2248
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002249Tools/Demos
2250-----------
2251
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002252- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2253
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002254- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2255
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002256- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2257 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002258
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002259- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2260 files.
2261
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002262Build
2263-----
2264
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002265- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002266 different root directory.
2267
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002268C API
2269-----
2270
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002271- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2272 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2273 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2274 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2275 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2276 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2277 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2278 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2279 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2280 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2281
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002282- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2283 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2284 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2285 from Python.
2286
2287
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002288New platforms
2289-------------
2290
2291None this time.
2292
2293Tests
2294-----
2295
2296- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2297 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2298
2299Windows
2300-------
2301
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002302- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2303
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002304- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2305 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2306 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2307 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2308 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2309 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2310 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2311 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2312 that's what it's for.
2313
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002314Mac
2315---
2316
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002317- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2318 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2319 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2320 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002321- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2322 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2323- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002324
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002325SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2326------------------------------------
2327
2328430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2329598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2330622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2331661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2332683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2333697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2334713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2335724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2336727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2337729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2338730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2339731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2340732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2341733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2342735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2343740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2344744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2345745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2346747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2347749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2348751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2349753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2350755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2351757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2352760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2353
2354
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002355What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2356================================
2357
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002358*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002359
2360Core and builtins
2361-----------------
2362
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002363- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2364 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2365
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002366- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2367 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2368 and cannot be strings).
2369
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002370- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2371 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2372 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2373 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2374
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002375- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2376 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2377 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2378 Python itself.
2379
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002380- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2381 the referenced object, if it has one.
2382
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002383- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2384 the thread started at
2385 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2386
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002387- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2388 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2389 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2390 placed on a list index.
2391
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002392- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2393 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2394 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2395 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2396
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002397- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2398 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2399 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2400 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2401 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2402 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2403 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2404
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002405- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2406 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2407 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2408 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2409 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2410
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002411- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2412 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002413
2414- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2415 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2416 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2417 #693195.)
2418
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002419- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2420 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002421
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002422- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002423 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002424 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2425 interpreter executions, would fail.
2426
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002427- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002428 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002429 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002430
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002431Extension modules
2432-----------------
2433
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002434- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2435 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2436 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2437 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2438
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002439- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2440 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2441
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002442- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2443 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2444 and Greg Chapman.)
2445
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002446- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2447 recursively.
2448
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002449- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002450 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2451 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2452 leaks.
2453
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002454- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2455
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002456- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2457 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2458 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2459 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2460 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2461 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2462 #705836.
2463
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002464- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002465 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2466
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002467- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2468 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2469 See SF bug #692416.
2470
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002471- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2472 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2473
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002474- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2475 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2476 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002477
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002478- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002479 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2480 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2481
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002482- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2483 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2484 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2485 timeouts to work properly.
2486
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002487Library
2488-------
2489
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002490- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2491 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2492 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2493 future release.
2494
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002495- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2496 for querying platform dependent features.
2497
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002498- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002499
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002500- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2501 pickle protocol versions.
2502
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002503- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2504 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2505 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2506
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002507- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2508
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002509- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2510 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2511 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2512 modules.
2513
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002514- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2515 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2516 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2517
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002518- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2519 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2520
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002521- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2522 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2523 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2524
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002525- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002526 MS Office extensions.
2527
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002528- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2529 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2530
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002531- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2532 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2533
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002534- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2535 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2536 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2537 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2538 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2539 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2540
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002541- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2542 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2543 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002544
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002545- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2546 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2547 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2548
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002549- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2550
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002551- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2552 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2553 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2554
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002555Tools/Demos
2556-----------
2557
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002558- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2559 See the module docstring for details.
2560
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002561Build
2562-----
2563
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002564- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2565 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002566
2567C API
2568-----
2569
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002570- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2571
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002572- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2573 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2574 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2575
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002576- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2577 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002578
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002579 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2580 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2581 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002582
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002583- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002584 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2585
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002586- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2587 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2588 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002589
2590New platforms
2591-------------
2592
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002593None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002594
2595Tests
2596-----
2597
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002598- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2599 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002600
2601Windows
2602-------
2603
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002604- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2605 function.
2606
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002607- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2608 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002609
2610Mac
2611---
2612
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002613- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2614 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002615
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002616- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2617 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002618
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002619- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2620 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2621 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002622
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002623- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002624 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2625 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002626
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002627- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2628 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002629
2630
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002631What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2632=================================
2633
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002634*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002635
2636Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002637-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002638
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002639- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2640 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2641 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2642
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002643- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2644 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2645 (SF patch #664376.)
2646
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002647- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2648 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2649 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2650 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2651 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2652 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002653 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002654
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002655- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2656 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2657 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2658 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002659 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002660
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002661- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2662 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2663 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2664 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2665 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2666 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2667 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2668 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2669 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2670 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2671 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2672
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002673- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2674 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2675 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2676 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2677 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2678 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2679
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002680- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2681 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2682
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002683- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2684 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2685 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2686 case.)
2687
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002688- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2689 passed as unicode strings.
2690
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002691- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2692 See SF bug #683467.
2693
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002694- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2695 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2696
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002697- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2698
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002699- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2700
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002701- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2702 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2703 arguments.
2704
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002705- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2706 See SF bug #667147.
2707
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002708- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002709 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002710 See SF bug #676155.
2711
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002712- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002713 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002714 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2715 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2716 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2717 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2718 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2719 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002720
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002721Extension modules
2722-----------------
2723
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002724- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2725 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2726 tp_as_number pointer.
2727
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002728- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2729 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2730 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2731 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2732 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2733
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002734- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2735
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002736- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2737
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002738- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002739 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002740 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2741 patch #678531.)
2742
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002743- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2744 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2745
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002746- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2747 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2748
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002749- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2750
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002751- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2752 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2753 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2754
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002755- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2756
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002757- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2758 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2759
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002760- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002761
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002762- datetime changes:
2763
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002764 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2765
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002766 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2767 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2768 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2769 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2770 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2771 now.
2772
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002773 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002774 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2775 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002776
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002777 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002778 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002779 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2780 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2781 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2782 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002783
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002784 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2785 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2786 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002787 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2788
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002789 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2790 by a later example coded by Guido.
2791
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002792 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002793 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2794 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2795 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002796 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2797 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2798
2799 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2800 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2801 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2802 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2803 tzinfo subclass instance.
2804
2805 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2806 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2807 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2808 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2809 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2810 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2811 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2812 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002813
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002814 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2815 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2816 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2817 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2818 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002819 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2820
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002821 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002822
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002823 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2824 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2825 as a naive datetime object.
2826
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002827 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2828 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2829 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2830
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002831 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2832 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2833 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2834 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2835 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2836 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2837 comparison.
2838
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002839 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2840 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2841 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2842 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002843 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002844
2845 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002846
2847 and ::
2848
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002849 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2850
2851 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2852 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2853 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2854 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2855
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002856 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2857 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2858 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2859 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2860 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2861
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002862 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2863 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002864 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2865 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002866
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002867Library
2868-------
2869
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002870- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2871 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2872
2873- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2874 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2875 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2876 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2877 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2878 See PEP 307 for details.
2879
2880- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2881 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2882
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002883- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2884 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002885 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002886 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2887 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002888 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002889
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002890- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2891 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2892
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002893- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2894 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2895 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2896
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002897- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2898
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002899- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2900 exception.
2901
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002902- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2903 class.
2904
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002905- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2906 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2907 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2908
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002909- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2910 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2911
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002912- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002913 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2914 See SF bug #659228.
2915
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002916- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2917 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2918 See SF patch #651082.
2919
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002920- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002921
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002922- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2923 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2924
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002925- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002926 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002927
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002928- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2929 DOS paths from other platforms.
2930
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002931Tools/Demos
2932-----------
2933
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002934- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2935 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2936 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2937 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2938 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2939 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2940 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2941 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2942 example:
2943
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002944 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2945 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002946
2947 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2948
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002949
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002950Build
2951-----
2952
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002953- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2954 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2955 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002956 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2957
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002958 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2959
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002960- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2961 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2962 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2963 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2964 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2965 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2966 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2967 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2968 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2969
2970- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2971 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2972 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2973 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2974
2975- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2976 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2977
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002978C API
2979-----
2980
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002981- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2982 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002983
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002984- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2985 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2986 tp_as_number pointer.
2987
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002988- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2989 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2990 (SF #681367)
2991
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002992- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2993 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2994 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2995 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002996
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002997Tests
2998-----
2999
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003000- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003001 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3002 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3003 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3004 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3005 pydoc.)
3006
3007- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3008
3009- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003010
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003011Windows
3012-------
3013
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003014- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3015 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3016 time).
3017
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003018- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3019 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3020
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003021- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3022 release without strong cryptography.
3023
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003024- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003025 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003026
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003027- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3028 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3029
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003030Mac
3031---
3032
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003033- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3034 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003035
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003036- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3037 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3038 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003039
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003040- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3041 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003042
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003043- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3044 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3045 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3046 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003047
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003048- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003049 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3050 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3051 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003052
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003053
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003054What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003055=================================
3056
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003057*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003058
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003059Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003060--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003061
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003062- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3063
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003064- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3065 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003066 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003067 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003068 a different meaning than before.
3069
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003070- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003071 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003072 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003073
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003074- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003075 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003076 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003077
3078- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3079 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3080 and deallocation.
3081
3082- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3083 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3084
3085- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3086 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3087 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3088 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3089 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3090
3091- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3092 now detected by the garbage collector.
3093
3094- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3095 [SF bug 519621]
3096
3097- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3098 identifier.
3099
3100- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3101 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3102 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3103 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3104 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3105 [SF bug 563060]
3106
3107- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3108 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3109 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3110 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3111 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3112
3113- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3114 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3115 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3116
3117- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3118
3119- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3120 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3121 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3122 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3123 state of the slots would be lost.)
3124
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003125Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003126-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003127
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003128- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003129 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3130 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3131 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3132 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003133 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3134 Jython 2.1.
3135
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003136- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003137 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003138 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3139 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3140 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3141 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3142 these, see PEP 302.
3143
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003144- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3145 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3146 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3147
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003148- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3149 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3150 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3151
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003152- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3153 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3154 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3155
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003156- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3157 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3158 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3159 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3160 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3161 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3162 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3163 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3164 releases or implementations.
3165
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003166- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003167 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3168 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003169
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003170- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3171 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3172
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003173- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3174 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3175 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3176
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003177- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3178 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3179
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003180- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3181 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003182 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3183 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003184
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003185- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3186 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3187 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3188 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3189 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3190
3191 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3192 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3193 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3194 pattern.
3195
3196 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3197 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3198 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3199 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3200
3201 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3202 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3203 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3204 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3205 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3206 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3207
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003208- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3209 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3210 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3211 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3212 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3213 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3214 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3215 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003216
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003217- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3218 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3219 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3220 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3221 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003222 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3223 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3224 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3225 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3226 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3227 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3228 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003229
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003230- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3231 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3232
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003233- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3234 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3235 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3236 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3237 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3238 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3239 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3240 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3241 to Zack Weinberg!
3242
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003243- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3244 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3245 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3246 type. This has been fixed now.
3247
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003248- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3249 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3250 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3251
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003252- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3253 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3254 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3255 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3256 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3257 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3258 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3259 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003260 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003261
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003262- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3263 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3264 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003265
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003266- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3267 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3268 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3269 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3270 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3271 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3272 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3273 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003274 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003275 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3276 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3277
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003278- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3279 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3280 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3281 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3282 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3283 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3284 this.)
3285
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003286- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3287 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003288 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003289 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003290 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3291 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003292 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3293 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003294
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003295- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3296 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3297 currently running.
3298
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003299- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3300 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3301 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3302 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3303
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003304- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3305 as directory names.
3306
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003307- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3308 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3309
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003310- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3311 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3312
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003313- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003314 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3315 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003316
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003317- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3318 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3319 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3320 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3321 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3322
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003323- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3324 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3325 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3326 removed.
3327
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003328- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3329 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3330 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3331
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003332- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3333 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3334 to __debug__.
3335
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003336- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3337 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3338 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3339
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003340- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3341 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3342 deprecated now.
3343
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003344- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3345 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3346 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003347
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003348- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3349 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3350 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3351 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3352 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003353
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003354- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3355 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3356
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003357- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3358 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3359 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003360 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003361 is backward compatible.
3362
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003363- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3364 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3365 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3366 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3367 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3368
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003369- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3370 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3371 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3372 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3373 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3374 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003375
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003376- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3377 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3378
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003379- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3380 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3381
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003382- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3383 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3384 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3385 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3386 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3387
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003388- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3389 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3390 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3391
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003392- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003393 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3394
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003395- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3396 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3397 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003398
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003399- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3400 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3401
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003402- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3403 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3404 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3405
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003406- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3407
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003408Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003409-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003410
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003411- Added three operators to the operator module:
3412 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3413 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3414 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3415
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003416- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3417
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003418- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3419 archives.
3420
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003421- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3422 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3423 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3424
3425 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3426
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003427- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3428 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3429 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003430 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003431
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003432- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3433 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3434 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3435 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003436 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3437 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3438 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3439 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003440
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003441- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3442 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003443
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003444- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3445
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003446- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3447 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3448
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003449- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3450 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3451 supported.
3452
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003453- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3454
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003455- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3456 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003457
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003458- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3459 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3460
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003461- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3462
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003463- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3464 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3465
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003466- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3467 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3468 functions but callable type objects.
3469
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003470- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003471 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003472 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003473
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003474- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3475 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003476
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003477- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3478 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003479
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003480- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3481 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3482 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3483 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3484
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003485- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3486 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003487
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003488- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3489 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3490 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3491 and __imul__.
3492
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003493- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003494 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3495 is called.
3496
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003497- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3498 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3499 interpreter was compiled.
3500
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003501- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3502 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3503 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003504 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003505 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3506 1, not 2.
3507
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003508- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3509 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3510 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3511 limit.
3512
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003513- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3514 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3515 bug #623464.
3516
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003517- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3518 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3519 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3520 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3521
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003522Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003523-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003524
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003525- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3526
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003527- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3528 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3529 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3530 with Python 2.3a2.
3531
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003532- os.path exposes getctime.
3533
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003534- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003535 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003536 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003537 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003538 unit tests of floating point results.
3539
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003540- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3541 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3542 has been increased.
3543
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003544- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3545 executed.
3546
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003547- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3548 postinstallation script.
3549
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003550- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3551 test the current module.
3552
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003553- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003554 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3555 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3556 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3557 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3558
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003559- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003560 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003561 Ward's Optik package.
3562
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003563- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3564 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3565 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3566 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3567
3568- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3569 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003570 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003571
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003572- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3573 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3574 shelf are binary pickles.
3575
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003576- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3577 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3578
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003579- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3580 modules are iterators now.
3581
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003582- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3583 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3584 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3585 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3586 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3587 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003588
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003589- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3590 with their entity value.
3591
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003592- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3593
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003594- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3595 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003596
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003597- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3598 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003599 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003600
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003601- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3602 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3603 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3604 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3605 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3606 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3607 main():
3608
3609 import locale
3610 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3611
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003612- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3613 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3614
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003615- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3616 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3617 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3618 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3619 to the new standard.
3620
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003621- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3622 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3623 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3624 an extension to the database.
3625
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003626- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3627 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3628 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3629 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003630 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003631
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003632- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003633 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003634
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003635- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3636 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3637 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3638 bounded integers.
3639
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003640- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3641 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3642 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3643 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3644 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3645 in existence.
3646
3647 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3648 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3649 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3650 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3651 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3652 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3653
3654 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3655 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3656 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3657 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3658
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003659- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3660 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3661 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3662
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003663- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3664
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003665- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3666 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3667 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3668 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3669
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003670- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3671 argument.
3672
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003673- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3674 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3675 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3676 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3677 [SF patch 560794].
3678
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003679- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3680 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3681 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003682 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3683 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3684 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003685
3686- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3687 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003688
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003689- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3690 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3691 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3692 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003693
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003694- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3695 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3696 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3697 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3698 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3699
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003700- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003701
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003702- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3703
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003704- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3705 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3706 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3707 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3708 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3709 identical to None.
3710
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003711- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3712 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3713 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3714 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3715 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3716 results now.
3717
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003718- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3719 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3720
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003721- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3722 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3723 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3724 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3725 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3726 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3727 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3728 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3729
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003730- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3731
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003732- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3733 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3734
3735- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3736 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3737 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3738 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3739 and other systems.
3740
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003741- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3742 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3743 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3744 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 +00003745 work well with these.
3746
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003747- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3748
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003749- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003750 connections.
3751
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003752- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3753 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3754 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3755
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003756- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3757 sets
3758
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003759- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3760 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3761 name.
3762
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003763- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3764 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3765 passed in.
3766
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003767- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003768 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003769 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3770 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003771
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003772- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3773
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003774- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3775
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003776- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3777 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3778 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3779
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003780- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3781 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3782 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3783 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003784 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003785
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003786- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003787 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003788 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003789
3790- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3791 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3792 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3793
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003794- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003795 the value of its expression argument.
3796
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003797- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3798 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3799 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3800
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003801- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3802 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3803 skipstone browser was included.
3804
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003805- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3806 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3807
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003808Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003809-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003810
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003811- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3812 names in addition to accepting file names.
3813
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003814- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3815 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3816 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3817 still used and useful.)
3818
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003819- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3820 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3821 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3822 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003823
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003824- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3825 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3826 the generated binary.
3827
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003828Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003829-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003830
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003831- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3832
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003833- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3834 except in the hands of experts.
3835
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003836- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003837 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3838 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3839 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003840
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003841- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3842 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3843 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3844 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3845 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3846 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3847 builds.
3848
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003849- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3850 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3851 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3852 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3853 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3854 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3855 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3856 new type.
3857
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003858- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003859
3860 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3861 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3862 positive infinities.
3863
3864 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3865 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3866 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3867 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3868 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3869 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3870 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3871
3872 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3873
3874 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3875
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003876- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3877 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3878 size of the executable.
3879
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003880- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3881 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3882 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3883 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003884
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003885- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3886
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003887- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3888 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3889 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003890
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003891- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3892 well as Unix.
3893
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003894- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3895 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3896 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3897 modules in the README file for details.
3898
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003899C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003900-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003901
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003902- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3903 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003904 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003905 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003906 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003907
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003908- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3909 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3910 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3911 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3912 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3913 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003914 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003915 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3916 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3917 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3918 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3919 aligned.)
3920
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003921- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3922 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3923 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3924
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003925- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3926 level.
3927
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003928- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3929 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3930 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3931 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3932 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3933
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003934- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3935 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3936 code.
3937
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003938- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3939 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3940 adjusting for negative indices.
3941
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003942- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3943 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3944 object.
3945
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003946- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3947 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3948 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3949
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003950- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3951 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003952
3953- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3954
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003955- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3956 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3957 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3958 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3959
3960- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3961
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003962- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003963
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003964- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003965 without going through the buffer API.
3966
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003967- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003968
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003969- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3970 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3971 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3972 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3973
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003974- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3975 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3976
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003977- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003978 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3979
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003980New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003981-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003982
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003983- OpenVMS is now supported.
3984
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003985- AtheOS is now supported.
3986
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003987- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3988
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003989- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3990
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003991Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003992-----
3993
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003994- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3995 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3996 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003997
3998Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003999-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004000
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004001- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4002 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4003 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4004 bugs.
4005 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004006 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004007 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4008 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004009 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004010
4011- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004012 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004013
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004014- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4015 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4016
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004017- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4018 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004019 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004020 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4021
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004022- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4023 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4024 use files" uninstall option).
4025
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004026- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4027
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004028- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4029 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4030
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004031- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4032 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4033 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4034
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004035- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4036 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4037 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4038 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4039 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004040 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4041 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4042 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004043
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004044- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004045 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004046 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4047 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4048 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4049 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4050 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4051 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4052 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4053 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4054 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4055 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4056 work around.
4057
4058- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4059 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4060 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4061 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4062 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4063 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4064 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4065 specified with O_CREAT too).
4066
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004067Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004068----
4069
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004070- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004071
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004072- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4073 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4074 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4075
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004076- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4077 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4078 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4079
4080- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4081 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4082 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4083 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4084 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4085 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4086 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4087 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004088
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004089- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4090 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4091 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004092
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004093- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4094 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4095 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4096 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4097 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004098
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004099- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4100 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4101 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004102
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004103- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4104 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004105
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004106- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4107 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4108 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4109 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4110 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004111
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004112- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4113 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4114 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4115
4116- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4117 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4118 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004119
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004120- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4121 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4122 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4123 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004124 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004125
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004126- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4127 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004128
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004129- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4130 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004131
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004132- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004133 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004134 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4135 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004136
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004137
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004138What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004139===============================
4140
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004141*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4142
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004143Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004144--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004145
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004146- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4147 with a custom metaclass.
4148
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004149Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004150-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004151
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004152- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4153 are proxies.
4154
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004155Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004156-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004157
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004158- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4159 very short strings.
4160
4161- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4162 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4163 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4164 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4165 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4166
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004167Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004168-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004169
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004170- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4171 close or delete time).
4172
4173- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4174 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4175
4176- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4177
4178- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004179 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004180
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004181Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004182-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004183
4184Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004185-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004186
4187C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004188-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004189
4190New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004191-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004192
4193Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004194-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004195
4196Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004197-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004198
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004199- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4200
4201- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4202 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4203
4204- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4205 deleted at process exit time.
4206
4207- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4208 in backslash.
4209
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004210Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004211----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004212
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004213- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4214 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4215 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4216
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004217
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004218What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004219===========================
4220
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004221*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4222
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004223Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004224--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004225
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004226- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4227 been extensively updated. See
4228
4229 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4230
4231 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4232
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004233- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4234 deleted!
4235
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004236- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4237 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4238 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4239 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4240 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4241
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004242- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4243
4244 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4245 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4246
4247 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4248 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4249 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4250 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4251 supported anyway.
4252
4253 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4254 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4255
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004256- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4257 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4258 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4259 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4260 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004261
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004262- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4263 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4264 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4265
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004266Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004267-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004268
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004269- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4270 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4271 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4272 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4273 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4274 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004275 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4276 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4277 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4278 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004279
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004280- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4281 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4282 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4283
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004284Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004285-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004286
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004287- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4288
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004289Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004290-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004291
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004292- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4293 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4294 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4295 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4296 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4297 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4298
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004299- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4300
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004301- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4302
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004303- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4304
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004305- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4306 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4307 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4308
4309- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4310
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004311Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004312-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004313
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004314- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4315 off a search on Google.
4316
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004317Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004318-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004319
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004320- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4321 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4322 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4323 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4324 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4325 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4326 other platforms should do likewise.
4327
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004328- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4329 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4330 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4331
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004332C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004333-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004334
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004335- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4336 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4337 producing key-value pairs.
4338
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004339- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004340 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004341 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4342 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4343 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4344 previously went unchallenged.
4345
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004346New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004347-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004348
4349Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004350-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004351
4352Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004354
4355Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004356----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004357
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004358- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4359 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004360
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004361- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4362 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4363 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4364 home.
4365
4366
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004367What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004368===========================
4369
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004370*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4371
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004372Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004373--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004374
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004375- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4376 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004377
4378 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004379 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004380
4381 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4382 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004383 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004384 This needs to be documented.
4385
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004386- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4387 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4388
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004389- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4390 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4391 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4392
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004393- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4394 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4395
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004396- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4397 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4398 class forbids it).
4399
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004400- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4401 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4402 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4403
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004404- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4405
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004406Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004407-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004408
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004409- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4410 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004411 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004412
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004413- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4414 (like 1 + '').
4415
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004416Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004417-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004418
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004419- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4420 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4421 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4422 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004423 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004424 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4425
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004426- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4427 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4428 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4429 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4430
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004431- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4432 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004433 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4434 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4435 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004436
4437- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4438 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004439
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004440- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4441 bytes on its input.
4442
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004443Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004444-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004445
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004446- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004447 convenience function.
4448
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004449- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4450 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4451 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004452 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4453 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4454 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4455 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4456 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4457 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004458
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004459- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4460 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4461 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4462 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4463
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004464- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4465 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4466 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4467
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004468- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4469 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4470 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4471 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4472
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004473- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4474 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004475 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004476 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4477 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4478 new -l and -e options.
4479
4480- statcache is now deprecated.
4481
4482- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4483 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004484 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004485 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4486 time properly taken into account.
4487
4488- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4489 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4490 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4491 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4492
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004493Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004494-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004495
4496Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004497-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004498
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004499- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4500 is built with libdb3 if available.
4501
4502- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4503
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004504C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004505-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004506
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004507- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4508 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4509 PySequence_Size().
4510
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004511- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4512
4513- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4514 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4515 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4516
4517- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4518 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4519
4520- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4521 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4522
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004523New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004524-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004525
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004526- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4527 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4528
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004529- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4530 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4531
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004532- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4533
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004534Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004535-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004536
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004537- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4538 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4539
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004540Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004541-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004542
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004543Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004544----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004545
4546- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4547 removed completely in the next release.
4548
4549- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4550 OSX.
4551
4552- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4553 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4554
4555- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4556
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004557
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004558What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004559===========================
4560
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004561*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4562
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004563Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004564--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004565
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004566- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004567 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004568 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004569 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4570 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004571 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4572 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004573 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4574 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004575
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004576- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4577 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4578
4579- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4580 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4581
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004582Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004583-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004584
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004585- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4586 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4587 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4588 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4589 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4590 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4591 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4592 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4593
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004594- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4595 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4596 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4597 example).
4598
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004599- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004600 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004601 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004602 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004603
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004604- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4605 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4606 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004607 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004608
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004609- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4610 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4611 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4612 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4613 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4614 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4615
4616 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4617
4618 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4619
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004620Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004621-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004622
4623- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4624
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004625- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4626
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004627- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4628 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004629
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004630- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4631 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4632 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4633 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4634 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4635 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004636 attributes.
4637
4638- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4639 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4640 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004641
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004642- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4643 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4644 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004645
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004646- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4647 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4648 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004649 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4650 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4651
4652- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4653 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004654
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004655Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004656-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004657
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004658- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4659 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4660
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004661- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4662 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4663 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4664 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4665
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004666- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4667 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4668 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4669 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4670
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004671 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4672 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4673 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4674 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4675 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4676 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4677 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4678 without losing information).
4679
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004680- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004681 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4682 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4683 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4684 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4685 module).
4686
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004687 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004688 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4689 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4690 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4691 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004692
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004693- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004694 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4695 encoding.
4696
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004697- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4698 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4699
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004700- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004701 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4702
4703- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4704 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4705 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4706 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4707
4708- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4709
4710- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4711 ON, and OFF.
4712
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004713- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4714 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4715
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004716Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004717-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004718
4719- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4720 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4721 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004722
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004723- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4724 been added: -X and -E.
4725
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004726Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004727-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004728
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004729- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4730 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4731
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004732C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004733-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004734
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004735- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4736 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4737 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4738 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4739 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4740
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004741- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4742 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4743 as long) arguments.
4744
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004745- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4746 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4747 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4748 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4749 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4750 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4751
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004752- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4753 input.
4754
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004755New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004756-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004757
4758Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004759-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004760
4761Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004762-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004763
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004764- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4765 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4766 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4767
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004768- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4769 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4770 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004771 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004772
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004773 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4774 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4775 import signal
4776 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004777
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004778 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004779 while 1:
4780 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004781 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004782 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4783 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4784 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4785 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004786
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004787
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004788What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4789===========================
4790
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004791*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4792
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004793Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004794--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004795
4796- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4797 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4798 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4799
4800- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4801 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4802 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4803 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4804 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4805 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4806 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004807
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004808- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004809 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004810 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4811 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4812 associate a docstring with a property.
4813
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004814- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4815 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4816 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4817 other built-in object types.
4818
4819- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4820 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4821 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4822 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4823 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4824
4825- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4826 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4827
4828- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4829 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004830 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004831 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4832 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4833 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4834 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4835 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4836
4837- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4838 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4839 class.
4840
4841- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4842 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4843 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4844 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4845
4846- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4847 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4848 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4849 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4850
4851- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4852 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4853
4854- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4855 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4856 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4857 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4858 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004859 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004860 with the same value as s.
4861
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004862- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4863
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004864Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004866
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004867- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4868
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004869- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4870 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4871 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4872 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4873 objects.
4874
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004875- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4876 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004877 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4878 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4879
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004880- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4881 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4882 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4883
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004884Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004885-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004886
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004887- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4888 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4889 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4890 by the instances.
4891
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004892- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4893 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4894 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4895
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004896- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4897 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4898 before the entire comparison is complete.
4899
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004900- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4901 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4902 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4903
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004904- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4905 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4906 getwriter().
4907
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004908- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4909 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4910
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004911- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004912 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4913 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4914
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004915- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4916 iterable object.
4917
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004918- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4919 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004920
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004921- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4922 authentication.
4923
4924- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4925 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004926
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004927- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004928 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4929 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4930 a sample driver.)
4931
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004932Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004933-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004934
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004935- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4936 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4937 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4938 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4939 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4940 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4941 kernel has large file support.
4942
4943- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4944 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4945 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4946 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4947 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4948
4949- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4950 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4951 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4952
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004953C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004954-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004955
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004956- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4957 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4958
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004959New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004960-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004961
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004962- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4963 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4964
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004965Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004966-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004967
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004968- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4969 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4970 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4971 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4972 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4973
4974- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4975 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4976 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4977 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4978
4979- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4980 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4981
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004982Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004983-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004984
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004985- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004986 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4987 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004988
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004989
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004990What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4991===========================
4992
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004993*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4994
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004995Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004996----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004997
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004998- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4999 big to represent as a C double.
5000
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005001- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5002 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5003 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5004 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5005 restriction).
5006
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005007- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5008 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5009 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5010 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5011 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5012
5013 >>> dir([])
5014 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5015 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5016 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5017 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5018 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5019 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5020 'reverse', 'sort']
5021
5022 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5023
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005024- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005025 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5026 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5027 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5028 OverflowError exception.
5029
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005030- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005031 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005032 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5033 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5034 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5035 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5036 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005037 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005038 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5039 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5040
5041 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5042 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5043 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5044 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005045
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005046- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005047 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5048 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5049 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5050 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5051 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5052 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5053 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5054 once it is created.
5055
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005056- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5057 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5058 (key, value) pairs.
5059
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005060- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005061 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5062 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5063
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005064- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5065 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5066 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5067 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5068 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005069
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005070- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005071 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5072 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5073
5074 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5075
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005076- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005077 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5078
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005079Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005080-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005081
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005082- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005083 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5084 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005085
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005086- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5087 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5088 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5089 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5090 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5091 in this area anymore).
5092
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005093- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5094 threading.Timer.
5095
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005096- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5097 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5098
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005099- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005100 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5101
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005102- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005103 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5104 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5105 converted to Python longs.
5106
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005107- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005108 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5109
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005110- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5111 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5112 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5113
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005114Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005115-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005116
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005117- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5118 division operators as per PEP 238.
5119
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005120Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005121-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005122
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005123- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5124 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5125 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5126 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5127
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005128C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005129-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005130
5131- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005132
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005133- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5134 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005135 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005136
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005137 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5138 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005139 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005140 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005141
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005142- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005143 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5144 module:
5145
5146 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005147
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005148 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5149 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005150
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005151 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5152 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005153
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005154 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5155
5156 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5157
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005158- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005159 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5160 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5161 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005162
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005163New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005164-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005165
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005166- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5167 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5168 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5169 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5170 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005171
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005172Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005173-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005174
5175Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005176-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005177
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005178- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5179 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5180 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5181 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005182 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5183 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5184 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5185 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5186 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005187
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005188- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005189 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5190
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005191
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005192What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5193===========================
5194
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005195*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5196
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005197Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005198-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005199
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005200- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5201 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5202
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005203- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5204 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5205 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005206
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005207- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5208 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5209 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5210 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005211
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005212- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5213
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005214- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005215
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005216Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005217-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005218
5219- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005220 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005221 the module docstring for details.
5222
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005223Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005224-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005225
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005226- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005227 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5228 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5229 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005230
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005231- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5232 Nick Mathewson.
5233
5234Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005235----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005236
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005237- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5238 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5239 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5240 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5241 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5242 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5243 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5244 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5245
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005246- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5247 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5248 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5249 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5250
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005251- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5252 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5253 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5254 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5255 come a long way).
5256
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005257- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5258 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5259 write filters for these warnings).
5260
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005261- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5262 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5263 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5264 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5265 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5266
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005267- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5268 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5269 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5270 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5271 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5272 older distribution.
5273
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005274Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005275-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005276
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005277- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5278 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005279 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005280
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005281- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5282 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5283 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5284
5285- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5286
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005287- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5288
5289- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5290
5291- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5292
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005293- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005294
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005295- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5296
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005297New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005298-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005299
5300C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005301-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005302
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005303- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5304 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5305 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5306 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5307 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5308 against buffer overruns.
5309
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005310- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005311 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5312 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005313 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5314 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5315 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5316
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005317- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5318 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5319 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5320 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5321 deprecated.
5322
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005323Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005324-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005325
5326- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5327 relevant is found.
5328
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005329
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005330What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005331===========================
5332
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005333*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5334
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005335Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005336----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005337
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005338- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5339 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5340 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5341 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5342 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5343 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5344 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5345 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005346 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005347 repaired.
5348
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005349- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005350 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005351 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5352 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5353 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5354 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5355 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5356 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5357 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5358 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5359
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005360- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5361 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5362 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5363 leading BMO character).
5364
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005365- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5366 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5367 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5368
5369 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5370 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5371 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005372
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005373 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5374 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5375 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5376 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5377 for various simple to use conversions.
5378
5379 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5380 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5381
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005382 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5383 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5384 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5385 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5386 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5387 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5388 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5389 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5390 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5391 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5392 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5393 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5394 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5395 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5396 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005397
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005398- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5399 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5400 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005401 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005402 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005403
5404 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005405 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5406 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5407 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5408 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5409 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005410 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5411 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005412
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005413 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5414 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5415 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005416 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005417
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005418- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5419 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5420 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5421 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5422 floating arithmetic,
5423
5424 x = 9007199254740992.0
5425 print long(x)
5426
5427 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5428 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5429 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5430 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5431 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5432 functions are of good quality).
5433
5434 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5435 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5436 algorithms to break.
5437
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005438- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5439 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5440 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5441 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5442 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5443 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5444 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5445 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5446 order.
5447
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005448- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5449 operation along the most common code paths.
5450
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005451- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5452 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5453
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005454- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5455 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5456 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5457 {}.update(UserDict())
5458
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005459- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5460 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5461 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5462 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5463 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5464 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5465 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5466 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5467
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005468- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005469 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005470
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005471 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005472 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5473 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005474 join() method of strings
5475 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005476 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5477 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005478 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005479 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005480
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005481- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5482 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5483
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005484- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5485 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5486
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005487- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5488 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5489 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5490 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5491
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005492- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5493 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005494 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005495 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5496 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005497
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005498- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5499
5500
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005501Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005502-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005503
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005504- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005505 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005506 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5507 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5508
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005509- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5510 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5511
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005512- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5513 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5514 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5515 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5516
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005517- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5518 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5519 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5520
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005521- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5522
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005523- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5524
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005525- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5526 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5527 that are still imported into string.py).
5528
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005529- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5530
5531- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5532 Now it does.
5533
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005534- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5535
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005536- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5537 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5538 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5539 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5540 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005541 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5542 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005543
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005544- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5545 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5546 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5547 'help(object)'.
5548
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005549Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005550-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005551
5552- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005553 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005554 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5555 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5556
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005557- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005558 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5559 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005560
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005561C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005562-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005563
5564- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5565 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005566
5567----
5568
5569**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**