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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000015- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
16
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000017- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
18 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
19
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000020- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
21 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
22 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
23
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000024- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
25
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000026- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
27 reference counts in some error exit cases.
28
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000029- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
30 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
31 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
32 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
33 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
34 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
35 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
36 realloc.
37
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000038- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
39 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
40
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000041- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
42 like their int counterparts.
43
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000044- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
45 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
46 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
47 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
48 for a longer write-up of the problem).
49
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000050- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
51 serializing floats.
52
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000053- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
54 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
55 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
56
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000057- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
58 278.
59
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000060- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
61 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
62 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
63 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
64 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
65 PyNumber_*().
66 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
67
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000068- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
69 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
70 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
71 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
72
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000073- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
74 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
75 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
76 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
77 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
78
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000079- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
80 disabled caused a crash.
81
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000082- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
83 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
84
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000085- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000086 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
87
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000088- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
89
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000090- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000091 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
92 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
93 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000094
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000095- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
96
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000097- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
98 returning None.
99
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000100- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000101 ('\') with a specific error message.
102
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000103- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
104
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000105- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
106 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
107
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000108- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000109 an ferror() call.
110
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000111- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
112 list.sort().
113
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000114- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
115 (2+3) --> (5).
116
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000117- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
118
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000119- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
120 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000121
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000122- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
123 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
124 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
125
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000126- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
127 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
128 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
129
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000130Extension Modules
131-----------------
132
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000133- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
134 on Windows.
135
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000136- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
137 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
138
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000139- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
140 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
141 for large or negative values.
142
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000143- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000144 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000145
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000146- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
147
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000148- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
149 if available on the platform.
150
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000151- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
152 available on the platform.
153
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000154- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
155 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
156
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000157- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
158
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000159- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
160 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
161 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
162
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000163- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
164
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000165- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
166 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
167
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000168- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000169 file size.
170
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000171- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
172
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000173- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
174 {remove_history,replace_history}
175
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000176- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
177 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000178
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000179- stat_float_times is now True.
180
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000181- array.array objects are now picklable.
182
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000183- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
184 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
185
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000186- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
187 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
188 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
189
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000190- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
191 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000192
193Library
194-------
195
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000196- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
197
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000198- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
199 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
200 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
201
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000202- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
203
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000204- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
205
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000206- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
207 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
208
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000209- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
210 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
211 Tkdnd.
212
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000213- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
214 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
215
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000216- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
217 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
218
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000219- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000220 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
221
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000222- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
223 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
224
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000225- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
226 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
227
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000228- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000229 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000230
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000231- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
232
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000233- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
234 error messages.
235
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000236- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
237
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000238- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
239 Bug #1224621.
240
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000241- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
242 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
243 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
244 terminates by raising StopIteration.
245
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000246- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
247
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000248- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
249 component of the path.
250
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000251- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
252 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
253 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
254 class at all.
255
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000256- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
257 files to PyPI.
258
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000259- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
260 them to PyPI.
261
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000262- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
263 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
264 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
265 work as expected.
266
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000267- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
268 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
269
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000270- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000271 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
272
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000273- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
274
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000275- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
276 to build.
277
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000278- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
279 symbolic links on Windows.
280
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000281- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000282 profile.py if available.
283
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000284- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
285
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000286- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
287 in LWPCookieJar.
288
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000289- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
290
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000291- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
292
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000293- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
294
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000295- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
296
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000297- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
298
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000299- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
300
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000301- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
302
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000303- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
304
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000305- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
306 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
307 be exploited in various ways.
308
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000309- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
310
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000311- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
312
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000313- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
314
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000315- Enhancements to the csv module:
316
317 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000318 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000319 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000320 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
321 reporting.
322 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
323 dictates.
324 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000325 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000326 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000327 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
328 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000329 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
330 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000331 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000332 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
333 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
334 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
335 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
336 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
337 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
338 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
339 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
340 without first creating a dialect class.
341 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
342 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
343 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000344 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000345 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
346 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000347 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
348 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
349 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
350 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000351 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
352 This has been fixed.
353
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000354- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
355 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
356 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
357 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
358
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000359- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
360
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000361- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
362 (Bug #951915).
363
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000364- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
365 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
366 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000367 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000368
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000369- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
370
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000371- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
372 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
373
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000374- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
375
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000376- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
377
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000378- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
379
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000380- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
381
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000382- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
383
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000384- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
385 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
386 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
387
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000388- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000389 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000390
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000391- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
392 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
393 tokenizer with very long source lines.
394
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000395- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
396 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
397
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000398- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
399 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000400
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000401- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
402 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
403
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000404- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
405 correctly.
406
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000407- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
408 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
409 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
410 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
411 between two lines.
412
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000413
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000414Build
415-----
416
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000417- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
418 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
419
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000420- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
421 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
422
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000423- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
424 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
425 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000426 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000427
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000428- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
429 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
430 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
431
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000432- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
433
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000434- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
435 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
436
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000437- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
438 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
439 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
440 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
441 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
442 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
443 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
444 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
445
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000446- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
447 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
448 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
449 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
450
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000451
452C API
453-----
454
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000455- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
456
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000457- Removed PyRange_New().
458
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000459
460Tests
461-----
462
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000463- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000464
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000465
466Documentation
467-------------
468
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000469- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
470
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000471- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
472
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000473- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
474
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000475- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
476
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000477- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
478
479- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
480
481- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
482
483- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
484
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000485- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
486 Closes bug #1166582.
487
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000488- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
489 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
490 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
491
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000492Mac
493---
494
495
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000496New platforms
497-------------
498
499- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
500
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000501
502Tools/Demos
503-----------
504
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000505- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
506 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
507 source files that need an encoding declaration.
508 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
509
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000510- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
511
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000512- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000513
514
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000515What's New in Python 2.4 final?
516===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000517
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000518*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000519
520Core and builtins
521-----------------
522
523- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
524 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
525 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
526
527
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000528What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
529==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000530
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000531*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000532
533Core and builtins
534-----------------
535
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000536- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
537 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
538 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
539
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000540
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000541Library
542-------
543
544- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
545 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
546 raised is re-raised.
547
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000548- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
549 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
550
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000551- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
552 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
553 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
554 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
555 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
556 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
557 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
558 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
559 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
560 by the slice are recomputed now.
561
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000562- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000563
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000564Build
565-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000566
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000567- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
568 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
569 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000570
571C API
572-----
573
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000574- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
575
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000576
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000577What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
578================================
579
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000580*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000581
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000582License
583-------
584
585The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
586is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
587changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
588Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
589intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
590durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
591the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
592License::
593
594 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
595
596says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
597to Python 2.1.1.
598
599The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
600License Version 2.
601
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000602Core and builtins
603-----------------
604
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000605- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
606 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
607 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
608 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
609 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
610 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
611 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
612 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
613 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
614 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
615
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000616- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000617
618Extension Modules
619-----------------
620
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000621- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
622 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
623 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
624 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000625
626Library
627-------
628
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000629- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
630 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
631 returned.
632
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000633- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
634
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000635- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
636 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
637
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000638- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
639
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000640- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
641 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000642
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000643- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
644
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000645- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
646
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000647- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000648 the source code is updated and reloaded.
649
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000650Build
651-----
652
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000653- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000654
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000655What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
656================================
657
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000658*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000659
660Core and builtins
661-----------------
662
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000663- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000664 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
665
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000666- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
667 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
668 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
669 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
670
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000671- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
672 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
673
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000674- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
675 constant.
676
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000677- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
678 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
679 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
680 large), and to anomalies such as
681 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
682 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
683 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
684 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000685
686Extension modules
687-----------------
688
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000689- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
690 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000691 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
692 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
693 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000694
695Library
696-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000697
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000698- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000699 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000700 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
701 --swig-cpp.
702
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000703- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
704 it is set.
705
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000706- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000707
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000708- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
709 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
710 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
711 Closes bug #1039270.
712
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000713- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000714
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000715 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000716 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
717 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
718 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
719 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
720 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
721 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
722 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
723 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
724 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
725 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
726 + Updates to documentation.
727
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000728- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
729 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
730 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
731 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
732
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000733- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000734
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000735- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
736 applications should use the getmember function.
737
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000738- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
739
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000740- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
741 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
742 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
743 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
744 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
745 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
746 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
747 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
748 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
749
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000750- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
751 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000752 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000753
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000754- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
755 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
756 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
757 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
758 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
759 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
760 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
761 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000762
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000763- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
764 the new public features (of which there are many).
765
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000766- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000767 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
768 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
769 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
770 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000771 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000772
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000773- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
774
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000775- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
776 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
777 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
778 options.
779
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000780- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
781 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
782 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
783 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
784 conditions under which non-string values work.
785
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000786Build
787-----
788
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000789- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
790 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
791 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
792
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000793- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
794 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
795 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
796 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
797 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000798
799C API
800-----
801
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000802- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
803 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
804
805- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
806
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000807- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
808 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
809 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
810 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
811 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
812 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
813 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
814 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
815 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
816
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000817- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
818
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000819- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
820 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
821 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000822
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000823Tests
824-----
825
826- test__locale ported to unittest
827
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000828Mac
829---
830
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000831- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
832 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
833 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000834
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000835Tools/Demos
836-----------
837
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000838- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
839 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
840 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
841 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
842 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000843
844
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000845What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
846=================================
847
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000848*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000849
850Core and builtins
851-----------------
852
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000853- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000854 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
855
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000856- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
857 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
858 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
859 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
860 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
861 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
862 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
863 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000864 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
865 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
866 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
867 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
868 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000869
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000870- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
871 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
872 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
873 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
874 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
875
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000876- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
877
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000878- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
879 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
880
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000881- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
882 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
883 modified the list.
884
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000885- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
886 functions is now writable.
887
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000888- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
889 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
890 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
891 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
892
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000893- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
894 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
895 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
896 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
897 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000898
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000899- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
900 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
901
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000902Extension modules
903-----------------
904
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000905- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
906
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000907- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
908 data.
909
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000910- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
911 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
912 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
913 supposed to have been truncated away.
914
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000915- Added socket.socketpair().
916
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000917- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
918 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
919
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000920- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000921 versions of Python, have now been removed.
922
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000923Library
924-------
925
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000926- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000927 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000928
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000929- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
930 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
931
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000932- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
933 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
934
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000935- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
936
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000937- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
938 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000939
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000940- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
941 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
942
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000943- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
944
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000945- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
946
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000947- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
948
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000949- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
950 Percivall.
951
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000952- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
953 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
954
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000955- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
956 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
957 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000958 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000959
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000960- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
961 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
962 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
963 and exponent.
964
965- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
966
967- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +0000968 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000969 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
970
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000971- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
972 to the readline module.
973
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000974- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000975 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
976 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000977
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000978- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
979 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
980 contains symlinks.
981
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000982- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
983 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
984
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000985- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
986 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
987 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
988
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000989- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
990 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
991 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
992 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
993 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
994 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
995 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
996 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
997 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
998 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
999 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1000 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1001 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1002
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001003- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1004
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001005Tools/Demos
1006-----------
1007
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001008- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1009 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1010
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001011- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1012
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001013Build
1014-----
1015
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001016- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1017 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1018 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1019 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1020 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1021 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1022 plans to do so.
1023
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001024- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1025 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1026
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001027- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1028 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1029
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001030- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1031 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1032
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001033- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1034 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1035
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001036- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1037 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1038
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001039C API
1040-----
1041
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001042..
1043
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001044Documentation
1045-------------
1046
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001047- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1048 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1049
1050- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1051 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1052 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001053
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001054New platforms
1055-------------
1056
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001057- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1058
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001059Tests
1060-----
1061
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001062..
1063
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001064Windows
1065-------
1066
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001067- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1068 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1069 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1070 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1071 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1072 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1073 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1074 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1075 the problem.
1076
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001077Mac
1078---
1079
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001080..
1081
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001082
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001083What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1084=================================
1085
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001086*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001087
1088Core and builtins
1089-----------------
1090
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001091- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1092 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1093 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1094 sensitive code.
1095
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001096- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001097 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001098
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001099 @staticmethod
1100 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001101
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001102 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001103
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001104- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1105 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1106 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1107 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1108 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1109 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1110 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1111 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1112 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1113 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1114 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1115
1116 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1117 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1118 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1119 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1120 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1121 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1122 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1123
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001124- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1125 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1126
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001127- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001128 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001129
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001130- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001131 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001132 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1133
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001134- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001135 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1136 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1137
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001138- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1139 types that support garbage collection.
1140
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001141- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1142
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001143- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1144 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1145 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1146 Jython.
1147
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001148- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1149
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001150- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1151 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1152
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001153- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1154 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1155 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001156
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001157- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1158 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1159 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1160
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001161Extension modules
1162-----------------
1163
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001164- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1165
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001166Library
1167-------
1168
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001169- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1170 TIS-620
1171
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001172- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1173 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1174 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1175 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1176 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1177 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1178 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1179 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1180 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1181 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1182
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001183- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1184
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001185- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1186 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1187 same as when the argument is omitted).
1188 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1189
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001190- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1191
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001192- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1193 schemes are offered.
1194
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001195- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1196
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001197- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1198 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1199 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1200
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001201- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1202
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001203- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1204 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1205
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001206- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1207 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1208 when dummy_threading is being used.
1209
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001210- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1211 from a tarfile.
1212
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001213- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001214 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001215
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001216- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1217 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1218 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1219 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1220
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001221- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1222 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1223
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001224- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1225 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1226 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1227 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1228 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1229 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1230 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1231 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1232 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1233 by some other method in progress).
1234
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001235- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1236 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1237 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001238
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001239- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1240
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001241- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1242 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1243 AM Kuchling.
1244
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001245- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1246 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1247 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1248
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001249- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1250 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1251 instead of unsigned.
1252
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001253- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001254 no longer part of the public API.
1255
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001256- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1257 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1258 string methods of the same name).
1259
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001260- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001261 SF patch 945642.
1262
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001263- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1264
1265 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1266
1267 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1268 DocTestSuites.
1269
1270- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1271 that provide thread-local data.
1272
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001273- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1274 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1275
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001276- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1277
1278- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1279 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1280 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1281
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001282- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1283
1284 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1285 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1286 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001287
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001288 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1289 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1290 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1291 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1292
1293 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1294 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1295
1296 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1297 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1298 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1299 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1300
1301 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1302 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1303 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1304 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1305 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1306
1307 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1308 wrapping help output.
1309
1310 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1311 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1312 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001313
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001314C API
1315-----
1316
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001317- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1318 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1319 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1320 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1321 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1322 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1323 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1324 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1325 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1326 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1327 its visible semantics have not changed.
1328
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001329- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1330 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1331
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001332Documentation
1333-------------
1334
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001335- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001336
1337 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001338 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001339
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001340 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001341
1342 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1343
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001344- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001345
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001346Tests
1347-----
1348
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001349- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001350 platforms that use the Makefile.
1351
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001352- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1353 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1354 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1355
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001356
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001357What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1358=================================
1359
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001360*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001361
1362Core and builtins
1363-----------------
1364
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001365- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1366 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1367 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1368 objects now (one object instead of three).
1369
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001370- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1371 Windows DLLs.
1372
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001373- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1374 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001375
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001376- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1377 a new .pyc magic.
1378
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001379- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1380 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1381 be there.
1382
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001383- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1384 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1385 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1386
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001387- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1388 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1389 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1390
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001391- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1392
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001393- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1394 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1395 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001396
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001397- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1398 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1399
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001400- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1401
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001402- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001403 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001404
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001405- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1406
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001407- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1408
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001409- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1410 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1411
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001412- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1413 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1414 Fixes bug #858016 .
1415
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001416- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1417 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1418 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1419
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001420- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1421 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1422 improves their performance (about 35%).
1423
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001424- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1425 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1426 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1427
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001428- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1429 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1430 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1431 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1432
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001433- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1434 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001435 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001436 length is not known).
1437
1438- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1439 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001440 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1441 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001442 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1443
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001444- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1445 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1446
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001447- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1448 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1449 keyword arguments.
1450
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001451- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1452 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1453 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1454
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001455- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1456 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1457 cases.
1458
1459- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1460 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1461 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1462 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1463 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1464 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1465 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1466 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1467 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1468 a release build.
1469
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001470- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1471 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1472
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001473- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001474 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001475
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001476- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1477 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1478 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1479 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1480 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1481 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1482 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1483 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1484 destroyed.
1485
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001486- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1487 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1488 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1489 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1490 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1491 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1492 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1493 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1494
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001495- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1496 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1497 character other than a space.
1498
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001499- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1500 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1501 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1502 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1503 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1504 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1505 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1506 attributes with the same name.
1507
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001508- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1509 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1510 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1511 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1512 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1513 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1514 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1515 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1516 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1517 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1518 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1519 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1520 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1521 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001522
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001523- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1524 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1525 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1526 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1527 This has been repaired.
1528
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001529- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1530
1531- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1532
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001533- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1534 over a sequence.
1535
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001536- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001537 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001538
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001539- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1540
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001541- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1542 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1543 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1544 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1545 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1546 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1547 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1548 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1549
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001550- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1551 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1552 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1553
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001554- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1555 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1556 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1557 freelist.
1558
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001559- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1560 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1561
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001562- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1563 number.
1564
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001565- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1566 a TypeError exception.
1567
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001568- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1569 820195.
1570
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001571- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1572 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1573 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1574
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001575- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001576 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1577 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001578
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001579- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1580 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1581 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1582
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001583- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1584 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001585 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001586
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001587- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001588 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1589 the first call.
1590
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001591
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001592Extension modules
1593-----------------
1594
Georg Brandl33a5f2a2005-08-21 14:16:04 +00001595- Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines() for files containing one line without
1596 newlines.
1597
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001598- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1599 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1600
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001601- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1602 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1603 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1604 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1605 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1606 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1607 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001608
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001609- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1610
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001611- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1612
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001613- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1614 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1615
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001616- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1617 fewer false positives.
1618
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001619- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1620 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1621
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001622- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001623 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1624
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001625- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001626 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001627 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001628 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1629 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001630
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001631- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1632 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1633 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1634 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1635
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001636- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1637 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1638 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1639 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1640 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1641 #897625.
1642
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001643- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1644 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1645
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001646- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1647 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1648 and pops on either side of the deque.
1649
1650- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1651 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1652
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001653- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1654 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1655 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1656 other functions that expect a function argument.
1657
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001658- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1659
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001660- os.getsid was added.
1661
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001662- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1663 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1664 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1665
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001666- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1667
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001668- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1669
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001670- readline.clear_history was added.
1671
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001672- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1673
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001674- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1675
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001676- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1677
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001678- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1679
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001680- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1681
1682- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1683
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001684- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1685
1686- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1687
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001688- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1689 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1690 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1691
1692- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1693 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1694 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1695 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1696 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1697 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1698 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1699
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001700- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1701 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1702 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1703 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001704
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001705- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001706 iterators from a single iterable.
1707
1708- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1709 of raising a TypeError exception.
1710
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001711- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1712 as parameter.
1713
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001714Library
1715-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001716
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001717- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1718
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001719- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1720 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1721 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001722
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001723- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1724 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1725 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001726
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001727- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001728
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001729- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1730 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001731
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001732- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1733 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1734
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001735- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1736
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001737- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001738 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001739
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001740- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001741 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001742
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001743- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1744
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001745- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1746 on cygwin and mingw32.
1747
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001748- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1749
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001750- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1751 module.
1752
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001753- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1754 installation scheme for all platforms.
1755
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001756- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001757 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001758
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001759- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1760 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1761 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1762
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001763- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1764 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1765 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1766
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001767- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1768
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001769- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1770
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001771- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1772 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1773
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001774- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1775 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1776 type pattern with the same value exists.
1777
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001778- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1779 when run from the command prompt).
1780
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001781- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1782 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1783
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001784- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1785 default sort).
1786
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001787- Added global runctx function to profile module
1788
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001789- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1790
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001791- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1792
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001793- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1794
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001795- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001796 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1797 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1798 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1799 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1800 accordingly.
1801
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001802- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1803 decoding standards.
1804
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001805- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1806 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1807 called for all requests.
1808
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001809- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1810 they are passed to the compiler.
1811
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001812- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1813 indent, width and depth.
1814
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001815- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1816 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1817
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001818- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1819 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1820
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001821- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1822
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001823- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1824
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001825- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1826
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001827- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1828 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1829
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001830- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001831 for better performance.
1832
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001833- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001834
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001835- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1836 a string).
1837
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001838- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1839
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001840- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1841
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001842- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1843
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001844- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1845
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001846- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1847 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1848 list of fieldnames.
1849
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001850- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1851 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1852
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001853- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1854
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001855- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1856 empty lists.
1857
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001858- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1859 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1860 and shelves.
1861
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001862- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1863 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1864
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001865- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001866 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1867 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001868
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001869- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1870 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001871 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001872
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001873- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001874 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1875 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1876
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001877- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1878 and removed in Py2.4.
1879
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001880- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1881
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001882- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1883
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001884Tools/Demos
1885-----------
1886
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001887- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1888 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1889
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001890- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1891
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001892- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1893 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1894 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1895 destination in situations where both files are given.
1896
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001897- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1898 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1899 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1900 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1901
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001902- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1903
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001904- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1905 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1906 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1907 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1908 now.
1909
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001910- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1911 in effect
1912
1913- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1914 C-c C-h
1915
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001916- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1917 -d option was given.
1918
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001919Build
1920-----
1921
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001922- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1923 build under OS X.
1924
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001925- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1926 --enable-profiling.
1927
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001928- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1929 is configured --with-tsc.
1930
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001931- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1932 on AMD64.
1933
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001934- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1935 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1936
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001937- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1938 removed.
1939
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001940- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1941 supported (see PEP 11).
1942
1943- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1944
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001945- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1946
1947- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1948 (see PEP 11).
1949
1950- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1951 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1952
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001953C API
1954-----
1955
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001956- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1957 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1958 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1959
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001960- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1961 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1962 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1963 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1964
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001965- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1966 generator objects.
1967
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001968- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1969 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001970 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1971 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001972
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001973- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1974 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1975
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001976- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1977 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1978 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1979 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1980 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1981
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001982- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1983 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1984 about 10% faster.
1985
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001986- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1987 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1988
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001989- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1990 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1991 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1992 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1993
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001994Windows
1995-------
1996
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001997- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1998 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1999 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2000 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2001
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002002- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2003 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2004 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2005
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002006
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002007What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2008===============================
2009
2010*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2011
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002012IDLE
2013----
2014
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002015- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2016 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2017 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2018 context-menu actions.
2019
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002020- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2021 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2022 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2023 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2024 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2025 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2026 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2027 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2028 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2029
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002030
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002031What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2032=============================================
2033
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002034*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002035
2036Core and builtins
2037-----------------
2038
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002039- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002040 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002041 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2042
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002043Extension modules
2044-----------------
2045
2046- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2047 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2048 than once. This has been fixed.
2049
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002050- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2051 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2052 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2053 call.
2054
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002055- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2056
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002057Library
2058-------
2059
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002060- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2061 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2062
2063- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2064 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2065 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2066 restored.
2067
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002068IDLE
2069----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002070
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002071- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002072
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002073Build
2074-----
2075
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002076- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2077 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2078
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002079C API
2080-----
2081
2082Windows
2083-------
2084
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002085- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2086 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2087
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002088- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2089
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002090Mac
2091---
2092
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002093- Various fixes to pimp.
2094
2095- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2096
2097- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2098 more problems than it solves.
2099
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002100
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002101What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2102=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002103
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002104*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2105
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002106Core and builtins
2107-----------------
2108
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002109- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2110 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2111
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002112- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2113 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002114 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002115
2116- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2117 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2118 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002119 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002120
2121- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2122 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002123
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002124- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2125 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2126 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2127
2128- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002129 770247.
2130
2131- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002132
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002133Extension modules
2134-----------------
2135
2136- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2137 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2138
2139- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2140
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002141- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2142
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002143- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2144 contained within the _strptime module.
2145
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002146- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2147 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2148
2149- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002150 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2151
2152- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2153 the find_class attribute, if present.
2154
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002155- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002156
2157 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2158 (SF bug 763298).
2159
2160 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002161 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2162 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2163 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002164
2165 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2166
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002167Library
2168-------
2169
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002170- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2171
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002172- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2173 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2174 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2175 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2176 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2177 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2178 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2179 or Tester().
2180
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002181- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2182 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2183 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2184 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2185 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2186 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2187 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2188 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2189 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002190
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002191 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002192
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002193- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2194 weren't before was an oversight.
2195
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002196- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2197 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2198
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002199- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2200 when there are no lines.
2201
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002202- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2203 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2204
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002205- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2206 to child processes.
2207
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002208- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2209
2210- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2211
2212- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2213 xmlrpclib.
2214
2215- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2216 responses.
2217
2218- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2219 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2220
2221- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2222 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2223 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2224
2225- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2226 used as patterns.
2227
2228- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2229 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2230 than Tk 8.3.
2231
2232- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2233
2234- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002235
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002236Tools/Demos
2237-----------
2238
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002239- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2240
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002241- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2242
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002243- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002244
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002245Build
2246-----
2247
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002248- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2249
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002250- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2251
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002252- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2253 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002254
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002255- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2256 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2257 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002258
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002259C API
2260-----
2261
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002262- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2263 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2264
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002265Windows
2266-------
2267
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002268- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2269 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2270 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2271 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2272 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2273 Python exception ::
2274
2275 thread.error: can't start new thread
2276
2277 is raised now.
2278
2279- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2280 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2281 instead of from DLL teardown.
2282
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002283Mac
2284---
2285
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002286- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002287 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002288 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2289 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2290 the executable in the bundle.
2291
2292- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002293
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002294- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2295
2296- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2297 on Panther.
2298
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002299What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2300================================
2301
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002302*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002303
2304Core and builtins
2305-----------------
2306
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002307- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2308 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2309 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2310 with the -i option.
2311
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002312- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2313 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2314
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002315- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2316 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2317
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002318- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2319 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2320 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2321 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2322 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2323 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2324 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2325 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2326 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2327 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2328 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2329 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2330 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002331
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002332- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2333 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2334 embedded in a lambda expression.
2335
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002336- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2337 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2338 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2339 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2340 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2341
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002342- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2343 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2344 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2345
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002346- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2347 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2348
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002349- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2350 It's writable again.
2351
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002352- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2353 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2354 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002355 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002356
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002357- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2358 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2359 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2360
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002361Extension modules
2362-----------------
2363
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002364- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2365 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2366
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002367- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2368 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2369 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2370 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2371
2372- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2373 collection.
2374
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002375- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2376 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2377 unique within a single program run.
2378
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002379- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2380 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2381
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002382- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2383 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2384
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002385- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2386 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002387
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002388- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2389
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002390- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2391 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2392
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002393- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2394 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2395 for many BSD-derived systems.
2396
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002397
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002398Library
2399-------
2400
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002401- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2402 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2403 primary ones:
2404
2405 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2406 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2407 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2408
2409 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2410 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2411 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2412 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2413 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2414 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2415
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002416- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2417 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2418 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2419 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2420 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2421 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2422 argument.
2423
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002424- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2425 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2426 in the archive.
2427
2428- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2429 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2430
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002431- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2432 569574).
2433
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002434- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2435 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2436 no more.
2437
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002438- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2439 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2440 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2441 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2442 code coverage.
2443
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002444- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2445 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2446 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002447 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2448 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002449
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002450- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2451 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2452 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002453 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002454
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002455- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2456
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002457- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2458 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2459 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2460 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2461
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002462- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2463 handling.
2464
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002465- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2466 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2467
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002468- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2469 in socket.py.
2470
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002471- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2472
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002473- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2474 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2475 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2476 opener with proxy support.
2477
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002478- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2479
2480- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2481
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002482Tools/Demos
2483-----------
2484
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002485- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2486
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002487- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2488
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002489- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2490 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002491
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002492- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2493 files.
2494
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002495Build
2496-----
2497
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002498- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002499 different root directory.
2500
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002501C API
2502-----
2503
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002504- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2505 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2506 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2507 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2508 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2509 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2510 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2511 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2512 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2513 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2514
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002515- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2516 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2517 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2518 from Python.
2519
2520
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002521New platforms
2522-------------
2523
2524None this time.
2525
2526Tests
2527-----
2528
2529- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2530 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2531
2532Windows
2533-------
2534
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002535- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2536
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002537- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2538 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2539 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2540 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2541 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2542 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2543 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2544 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2545 that's what it's for.
2546
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002547Mac
2548---
2549
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002550- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2551 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2552 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2553 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002554- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2555 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2556- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002557
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002558SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2559------------------------------------
2560
2561430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2562598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2563622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2564661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2565683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2566697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2567713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2568724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2569727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2570729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2571730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2572731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2573732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2574733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2575735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2576740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2577744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2578745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2579747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2580749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2581751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2582753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2583755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2584757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2585760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2586
2587
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002588What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2589================================
2590
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002591*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002592
2593Core and builtins
2594-----------------
2595
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002596- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2597 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2598
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002599- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2600 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2601 and cannot be strings).
2602
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002603- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2604 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2605 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2606 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2607
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002608- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2609 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2610 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2611 Python itself.
2612
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002613- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2614 the referenced object, if it has one.
2615
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002616- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2617 the thread started at
2618 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2619
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002620- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2621 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2622 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2623 placed on a list index.
2624
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002625- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2626 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2627 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2628 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2629
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002630- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2631 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2632 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2633 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2634 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2635 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2636 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2637
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002638- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2639 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2640 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2641 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2642 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2643
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002644- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2645 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002646
2647- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2648 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2649 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2650 #693195.)
2651
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002652- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2653 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002654
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002655- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002656 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002657 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2658 interpreter executions, would fail.
2659
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002660- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002661 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002662 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002663
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002664Extension modules
2665-----------------
2666
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002667- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2668 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2669 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2670 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2671
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002672- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2673 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2674
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002675- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2676 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2677 and Greg Chapman.)
2678
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002679- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2680 recursively.
2681
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002682- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002683 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2684 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2685 leaks.
2686
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002687- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2688
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002689- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2690 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2691 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2692 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2693 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2694 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2695 #705836.
2696
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002697- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002698 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2699
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002700- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2701 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2702 See SF bug #692416.
2703
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002704- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2705 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2706
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002707- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2708 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2709 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002710
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002711- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002712 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2713 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2714
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002715- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2716 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2717 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2718 timeouts to work properly.
2719
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002720Library
2721-------
2722
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002723- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2724 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2725 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2726 future release.
2727
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002728- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2729 for querying platform dependent features.
2730
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002731- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002732
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002733- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2734 pickle protocol versions.
2735
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002736- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2737 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2738 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2739
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002740- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2741
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002742- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2743 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2744 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2745 modules.
2746
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002747- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2748 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2749 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2750
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002751- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2752 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2753
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002754- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2755 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2756 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2757
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002758- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002759 MS Office extensions.
2760
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002761- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2762 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2763
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002764- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2765 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2766
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002767- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2768 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2769 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2770 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2771 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2772 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2773
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002774- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2775 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2776 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002777
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002778- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2779 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2780 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2781
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002782- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2783
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002784- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2785 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2786 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2787
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002788Tools/Demos
2789-----------
2790
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002791- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2792 See the module docstring for details.
2793
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002794Build
2795-----
2796
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002797- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2798 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002799
2800C API
2801-----
2802
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002803- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2804
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002805- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2806 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2807 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2808
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002809- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2810 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002811
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002812 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2813 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2814 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002815
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002816- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002817 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2818
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002819- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2820 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2821 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002822
2823New platforms
2824-------------
2825
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002826None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002827
2828Tests
2829-----
2830
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002831- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2832 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002833
2834Windows
2835-------
2836
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002837- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2838 function.
2839
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002840- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2841 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002842
2843Mac
2844---
2845
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002846- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2847 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002848
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002849- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2850 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002851
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002852- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2853 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2854 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002855
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002856- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002857 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2858 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002859
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002860- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2861 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002862
2863
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002864What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2865=================================
2866
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002867*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002868
2869Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002870-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002871
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002872- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2873 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2874 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2875
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002876- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2877 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2878 (SF patch #664376.)
2879
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002880- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2881 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2882 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2883 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2884 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2885 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002886 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002887
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002888- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2889 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2890 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2891 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002892 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002893
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002894- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2895 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2896 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2897 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2898 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2899 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2900 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2901 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2902 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2903 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2904 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2905
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002906- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2907 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2908 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2909 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2910 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2911 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2912
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002913- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2914 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2915
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002916- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2917 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2918 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2919 case.)
2920
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002921- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2922 passed as unicode strings.
2923
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002924- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2925 See SF bug #683467.
2926
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002927- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2928 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2929
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002930- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2931
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002932- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2933
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002934- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2935 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2936 arguments.
2937
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002938- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2939 See SF bug #667147.
2940
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002941- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002942 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002943 See SF bug #676155.
2944
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002945- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002946 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002947 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2948 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2949 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2950 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2951 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2952 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002953
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002954Extension modules
2955-----------------
2956
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002957- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2958 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2959 tp_as_number pointer.
2960
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002961- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2962 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2963 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2964 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2965 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2966
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002967- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2968
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002969- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2970
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002971- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002972 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002973 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2974 patch #678531.)
2975
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002976- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2977 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2978
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002979- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2980 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2981
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002982- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2983
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002984- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2985 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2986 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2987
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002988- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2989
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002990- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2991 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2992
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002993- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002994
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002995- datetime changes:
2996
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002997 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2998
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002999 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3000 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3001 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3002 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3003 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3004 now.
3005
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003006 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003007 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3008 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003009
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003010 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003011 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003012 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3013 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3014 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3015 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003016
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003017 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3018 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3019 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003020 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3021
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003022 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3023 by a later example coded by Guido.
3024
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003025 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003026 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3027 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3028 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003029 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3030 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3031
3032 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3033 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3034 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3035 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3036 tzinfo subclass instance.
3037
3038 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3039 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3040 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3041 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3042 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3043 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3044 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3045 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003046
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003047 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3048 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3049 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3050 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3051 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003052 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3053
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003054 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003055
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003056 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3057 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3058 as a naive datetime object.
3059
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003060 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3061 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3062 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3063
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003064 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3065 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3066 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3067 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3068 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3069 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3070 comparison.
3071
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003072 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3073 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3074 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3075 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003076 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003077
3078 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003079
3080 and ::
3081
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003082 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3083
3084 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3085 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3086 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3087 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3088
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003089 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3090 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3091 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3092 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3093 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3094
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003095 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3096 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003097 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3098 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003099
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003100Library
3101-------
3102
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003103- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3104 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3105
3106- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3107 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3108 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3109 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3110 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3111 See PEP 307 for details.
3112
3113- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3114 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3115
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003116- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3117 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003118 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003119 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3120 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003121 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003122
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003123- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3124 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3125
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003126- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3127 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3128 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3129
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003130- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3131
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003132- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3133 exception.
3134
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003135- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3136 class.
3137
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003138- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3139 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3140 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3141
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003142- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3143 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3144
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003145- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003146 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3147 See SF bug #659228.
3148
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003149- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3150 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3151 See SF patch #651082.
3152
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003153- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003154
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003155- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3156 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3157
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003158- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003159 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003160
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003161- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3162 DOS paths from other platforms.
3163
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003164Tools/Demos
3165-----------
3166
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003167- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3168 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3169 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3170 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3171 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3172 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3173 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3174 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3175 example:
3176
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003177 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3178 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003179
3180 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3181
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003182
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003183Build
3184-----
3185
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003186- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3187 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3188 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003189 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3190
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003191 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3192
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003193- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3194 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3195 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3196 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3197 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3198 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3199 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3200 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3201 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3202
3203- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3204 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3205 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3206 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3207
3208- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3209 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3210
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003211C API
3212-----
3213
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003214- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3215 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003216
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003217- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3218 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3219 tp_as_number pointer.
3220
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003221- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3222 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3223 (SF #681367)
3224
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003225- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3226 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3227 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3228 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003229
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003230Tests
3231-----
3232
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003233- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003234 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3235 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3236 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3237 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3238 pydoc.)
3239
3240- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3241
3242- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003243
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003244Windows
3245-------
3246
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003247- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3248 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3249 time).
3250
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003251- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3252 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3253
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003254- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3255 release without strong cryptography.
3256
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003257- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003258 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003259
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003260- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3261 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3262
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003263Mac
3264---
3265
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003266- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3267 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003268
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003269- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3270 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3271 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003272
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003273- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3274 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003275
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003276- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3277 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3278 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3279 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003280
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003281- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003282 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3283 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3284 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003285
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003286
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003287What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003288=================================
3289
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003290*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003291
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003292Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003293--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003294
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003295- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3296
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003297- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3298 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003299 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003300 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003301 a different meaning than before.
3302
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003303- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003304 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003305 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003306
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003307- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003308 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003309 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003310
3311- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3312 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3313 and deallocation.
3314
3315- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3316 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3317
3318- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3319 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3320 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3321 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3322 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3323
3324- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3325 now detected by the garbage collector.
3326
3327- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3328 [SF bug 519621]
3329
3330- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3331 identifier.
3332
3333- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3334 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3335 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3336 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3337 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3338 [SF bug 563060]
3339
3340- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3341 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3342 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3343 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3344 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3345
3346- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3347 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3348 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3349
3350- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3351
3352- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3353 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3354 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3355 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3356 state of the slots would be lost.)
3357
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003358Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003359-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003360
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003361- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003362 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3363 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3364 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3365 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003366 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3367 Jython 2.1.
3368
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003369- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003370 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003371 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3372 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3373 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3374 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3375 these, see PEP 302.
3376
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003377- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3378 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3379 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3380
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003381- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3382 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3383 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3384
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003385- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3386 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3387 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3388
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003389- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3390 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3391 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3392 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3393 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3394 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3395 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3396 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3397 releases or implementations.
3398
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003399- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003400 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3401 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003402
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003403- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3404 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3405
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003406- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3407 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3408 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3409
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003410- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3411 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3412
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003413- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3414 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003415 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3416 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003417
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003418- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3419 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3420 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3421 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3422 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3423
3424 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3425 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3426 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3427 pattern.
3428
3429 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3430 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3431 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3432 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3433
3434 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3435 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3436 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3437 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3438 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3439 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3440
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003441- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3442 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3443 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3444 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3445 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3446 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3447 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3448 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003449
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003450- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3451 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3452 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3453 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3454 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003455 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3456 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3457 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3458 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3459 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3460 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3461 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003462
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003463- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3464 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3465
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003466- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3467 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3468 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3469 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3470 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3471 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3472 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3473 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3474 to Zack Weinberg!
3475
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003476- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3477 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3478 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3479 type. This has been fixed now.
3480
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003481- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3482 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3483 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3484
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003485- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3486 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3487 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3488 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3489 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3490 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3491 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3492 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003493 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003494
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003495- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3496 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3497 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003498
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003499- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3500 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3501 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3502 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3503 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3504 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3505 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3506 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003507 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003508 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3509 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3510
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003511- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3512 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3513 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3514 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3515 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3516 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3517 this.)
3518
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003519- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3520 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003521 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003522 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003523 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3524 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003525 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3526 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003527
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003528- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3529 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3530 currently running.
3531
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003532- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3533 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3534 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3535 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3536
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003537- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3538 as directory names.
3539
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003540- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3541 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3542
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003543- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3544 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3545
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003546- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003547 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3548 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003549
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003550- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3551 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3552 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3553 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3554 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3555
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003556- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3557 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3558 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3559 removed.
3560
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003561- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3562 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3563 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3564
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003565- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3566 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3567 to __debug__.
3568
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003569- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3570 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3571 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3572
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003573- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3574 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3575 deprecated now.
3576
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003577- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3578 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3579 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003580
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003581- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3582 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3583 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3584 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3585 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003586
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003587- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3588 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3589
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003590- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3591 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3592 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003593 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003594 is backward compatible.
3595
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003596- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3597 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3598 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3599 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3600 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3601
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003602- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3603 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3604 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3605 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3606 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3607 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003608
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003609- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3610 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3611
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003612- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3613 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3614
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003615- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3616 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3617 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3618 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3619 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3620
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003621- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3622 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3623 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3624
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003625- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003626 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3627
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003628- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3629 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3630 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003631
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003632- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3633 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3634
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003635- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3636 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3637 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3638
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003639- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3640
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003641Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003642-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003643
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003644- Added three operators to the operator module:
3645 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3646 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3647 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3648
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003649- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3650
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003651- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3652 archives.
3653
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003654- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3655 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3656 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3657
3658 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3659
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003660- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3661 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3662 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003663 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003664
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003665- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3666 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3667 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3668 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003669 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3670 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3671 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3672 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003673
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003674- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3675 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003676
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003677- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3678
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003679- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3680 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3681
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003682- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3683 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3684 supported.
3685
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003686- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3687
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003688- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3689 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003690
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003691- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3692 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3693
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003694- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3695
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003696- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3697 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3698
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003699- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3700 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3701 functions but callable type objects.
3702
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003703- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003704 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003705 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003706
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003707- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3708 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003709
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003710- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3711 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003712
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003713- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3714 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3715 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3716 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3717
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003718- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3719 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003720
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003721- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3722 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3723 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3724 and __imul__.
3725
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003726- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003727 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3728 is called.
3729
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003730- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3731 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3732 interpreter was compiled.
3733
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003734- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3735 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3736 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003737 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003738 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3739 1, not 2.
3740
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003741- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3742 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3743 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3744 limit.
3745
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003746- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3747 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3748 bug #623464.
3749
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003750- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3751 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3752 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3753 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3754
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003755Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003756-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003757
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003758- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3759
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003760- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3761 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3762 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3763 with Python 2.3a2.
3764
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003765- os.path exposes getctime.
3766
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003767- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003768 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003769 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003770 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003771 unit tests of floating point results.
3772
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003773- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3774 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3775 has been increased.
3776
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003777- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3778 executed.
3779
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003780- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3781 postinstallation script.
3782
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003783- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3784 test the current module.
3785
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003786- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003787 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3788 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3789 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3790 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3791
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003792- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003793 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003794 Ward's Optik package.
3795
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003796- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3797 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3798 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3799 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3800
3801- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3802 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003803 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003804
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003805- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3806 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3807 shelf are binary pickles.
3808
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003809- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3810 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3811
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003812- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3813 modules are iterators now.
3814
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003815- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3816 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3817 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3818 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3819 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3820 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003821
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003822- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3823 with their entity value.
3824
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003825- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3826
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003827- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3828 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003829
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003830- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3831 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003832 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003833
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003834- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3835 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3836 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3837 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3838 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3839 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3840 main():
3841
3842 import locale
3843 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3844
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003845- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3846 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3847
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003848- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3849 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3850 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3851 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3852 to the new standard.
3853
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003854- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3855 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3856 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3857 an extension to the database.
3858
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003859- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3860 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3861 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3862 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003863 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003864
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003865- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003866 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003867
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003868- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3869 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3870 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3871 bounded integers.
3872
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003873- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3874 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3875 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3876 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3877 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3878 in existence.
3879
3880 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3881 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3882 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3883 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3884 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3885 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3886
3887 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3888 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3889 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3890 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3891
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003892- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3893 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3894 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3895
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003896- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3897
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003898- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3899 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3900 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3901 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3902
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003903- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3904 argument.
3905
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003906- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3907 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3908 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3909 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3910 [SF patch 560794].
3911
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003912- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3913 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3914 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003915 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3916 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3917 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003918
3919- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3920 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003921
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003922- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3923 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3924 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3925 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003926
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003927- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3928 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3929 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3930 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3931 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3932
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003933- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003934
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003935- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3936
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003937- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3938 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3939 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3940 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3941 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3942 identical to None.
3943
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003944- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3945 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3946 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3947 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3948 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3949 results now.
3950
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003951- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3952 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3953
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003954- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3955 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3956 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3957 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3958 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3959 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3960 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3961 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3962
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003963- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3964
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003965- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3966 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3967
3968- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3969 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3970 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3971 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3972 and other systems.
3973
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003974- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3975 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3976 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3977 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 +00003978 work well with these.
3979
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003980- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3981
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003982- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003983 connections.
3984
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003985- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3986 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3987 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3988
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003989- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3990 sets
3991
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003992- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3993 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3994 name.
3995
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003996- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3997 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3998 passed in.
3999
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004000- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004001 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004002 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4003 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004004
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004005- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4006
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004007- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4008
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004009- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4010 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4011 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4012
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004013- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4014 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4015 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4016 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004017 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004018
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004019- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004020 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004021 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004022
4023- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4024 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4025 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4026
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004027- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004028 the value of its expression argument.
4029
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004030- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4031 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4032 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4033
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004034- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4035 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4036 skipstone browser was included.
4037
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004038- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4039 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4040
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004041Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004042-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004043
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004044- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4045 names in addition to accepting file names.
4046
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004047- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4048 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4049 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4050 still used and useful.)
4051
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004052- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4053 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4054 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4055 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004056
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004057- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4058 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4059 the generated binary.
4060
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004061Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004062-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004063
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004064- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4065
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004066- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4067 except in the hands of experts.
4068
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004069- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004070 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4071 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4072 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004073
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004074- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4075 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4076 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4077 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4078 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4079 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4080 builds.
4081
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004082- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4083 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4084 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4085 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4086 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4087 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4088 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4089 new type.
4090
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004091- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004092
4093 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4094 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4095 positive infinities.
4096
4097 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4098 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4099 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4100 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4101 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4102 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4103 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4104
4105 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4106
4107 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4108
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004109- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4110 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4111 size of the executable.
4112
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004113- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4114 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4115 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4116 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004117
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004118- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4119
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004120- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4121 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4122 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004123
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004124- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4125 well as Unix.
4126
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004127- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4128 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4129 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4130 modules in the README file for details.
4131
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004132C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004133-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004134
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004135- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4136 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004137 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004138 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004139 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004140
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004141- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4142 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4143 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4144 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4145 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4146 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004147 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004148 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4149 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4150 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4151 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4152 aligned.)
4153
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004154- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4155 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4156 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4157
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004158- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4159 level.
4160
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004161- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4162 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4163 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4164 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4165 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4166
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004167- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4168 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4169 code.
4170
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004171- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4172 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4173 adjusting for negative indices.
4174
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004175- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4176 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4177 object.
4178
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004179- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4180 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4181 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4182
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004183- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4184 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004185
4186- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4187
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004188- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4189 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4190 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4191 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4192
4193- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4194
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004195- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004196
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004197- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004198 without going through the buffer API.
4199
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004200- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004201
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004202- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4203 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4204 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4205 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4206
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004207- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4208 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4209
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004210- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004211 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4212
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004213New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004214-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004215
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004216- OpenVMS is now supported.
4217
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004218- AtheOS is now supported.
4219
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004220- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4221
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004222- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4223
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004224Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004225-----
4226
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004227- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4228 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4229 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004230
4231Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004232-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004233
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004234- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4235 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4236 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4237 bugs.
4238 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004239 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004240 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4241 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004242 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004243
4244- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004245 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004246
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004247- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4248 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4249
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004250- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4251 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004252 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004253 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4254
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004255- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4256 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4257 use files" uninstall option).
4258
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004259- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4260
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004261- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4262 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4263
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004264- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4265 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4266 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4267
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004268- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4269 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4270 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4271 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4272 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004273 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4274 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4275 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004276
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004277- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004278 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004279 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4280 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4281 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4282 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4283 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4284 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4285 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4286 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4287 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4288 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4289 work around.
4290
4291- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4292 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4293 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4294 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4295 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4296 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4297 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4298 specified with O_CREAT too).
4299
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004300Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004301----
4302
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004303- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004304
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004305- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4306 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4307 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4308
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004309- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4310 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4311 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4312
4313- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4314 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4315 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4316 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4317 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4318 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4319 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4320 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004321
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004322- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4323 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4324 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004325
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004326- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4327 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4328 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4329 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4330 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004331
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004332- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4333 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4334 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004335
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004336- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4337 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004338
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004339- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4340 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4341 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4342 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4343 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004344
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004345- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4346 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4347 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4348
4349- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4350 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4351 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004352
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004353- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4354 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4355 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4356 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004357 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004358
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004359- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4360 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004361
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004362- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4363 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004364
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004365- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004366 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004367 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4368 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004369
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004370
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004371What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004372===============================
4373
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004374*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4375
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004376Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004377--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004378
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004379- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4380 with a custom metaclass.
4381
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004382Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004383-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004384
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004385- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4386 are proxies.
4387
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004388Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004389-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004390
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004391- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4392 very short strings.
4393
4394- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4395 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4396 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4397 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4398 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4399
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004400Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004401-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004402
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004403- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4404 close or delete time).
4405
4406- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4407 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4408
4409- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4410
4411- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004412 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004413
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004414Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004415-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004416
4417Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004418-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004419
4420C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004421-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004422
4423New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004424-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004425
4426Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004427-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004428
4429Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004430-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004431
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004432- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4433
4434- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4435 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4436
4437- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4438 deleted at process exit time.
4439
4440- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4441 in backslash.
4442
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004443Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004444----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004445
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004446- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4447 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4448 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4449
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004450
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004451What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004452===========================
4453
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004454*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4455
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004456Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004457--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004458
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004459- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4460 been extensively updated. See
4461
4462 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4463
4464 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4465
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004466- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4467 deleted!
4468
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004469- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4470 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4471 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4472 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4473 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4474
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004475- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4476
4477 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4478 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4479
4480 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4481 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4482 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4483 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4484 supported anyway.
4485
4486 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4487 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4488
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004489- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4490 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4491 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4492 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4493 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004494
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004495- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4496 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4497 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4498
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004499Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004500-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004501
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004502- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4503 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4504 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4505 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4506 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4507 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004508 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4509 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4510 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4511 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004512
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004513- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4514 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4515 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4516
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004517Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004518-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004519
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004520- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4521
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004522Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004523-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004524
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004525- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4526 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4527 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4528 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4529 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4530 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4531
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004532- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4533
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004534- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4535
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004536- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4537
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004538- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4539 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4540 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4541
4542- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4543
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004544Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004545-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004546
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004547- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4548 off a search on Google.
4549
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004550Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004551-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004552
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004553- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4554 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4555 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4556 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4557 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4558 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4559 other platforms should do likewise.
4560
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004561- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4562 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4563 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4564
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004565C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004566-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004567
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004568- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4569 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4570 producing key-value pairs.
4571
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004572- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004573 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004574 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4575 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4576 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4577 previously went unchallenged.
4578
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004579New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004580-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004581
4582Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004583-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004584
4585Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004586-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004587
4588Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004589----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004590
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004591- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4592 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004593
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004594- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4595 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4596 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4597 home.
4598
4599
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004600What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004601===========================
4602
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004603*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4604
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004605Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004606--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004607
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004608- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4609 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004610
4611 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004612 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004613
4614 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4615 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004616 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004617 This needs to be documented.
4618
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004619- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4620 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4621
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004622- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4623 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4624 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4625
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004626- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4627 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4628
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004629- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4630 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4631 class forbids it).
4632
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004633- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4634 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4635 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4636
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004637- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4638
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004639Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004640-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004641
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004642- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4643 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004644 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004645
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004646- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4647 (like 1 + '').
4648
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004649Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004650-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004651
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004652- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4653 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4654 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4655 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004656 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004657 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4658
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004659- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4660 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4661 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4662 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4663
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004664- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4665 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004666 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4667 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4668 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004669
4670- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4671 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004672
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004673- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4674 bytes on its input.
4675
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004676Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004677-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004678
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004679- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004680 convenience function.
4681
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004682- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4683 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4684 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004685 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4686 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4687 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4688 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4689 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4690 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004691
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004692- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4693 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4694 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4695 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4696
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004697- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4698 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4699 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4700
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004701- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4702 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4703 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4704 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4705
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004706- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4707 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004708 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004709 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4710 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4711 new -l and -e options.
4712
4713- statcache is now deprecated.
4714
4715- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4716 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004717 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004718 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4719 time properly taken into account.
4720
4721- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4722 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4723 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4724 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4725
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004726Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004727-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004728
4729Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004730-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004731
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004732- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4733 is built with libdb3 if available.
4734
4735- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4736
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004737C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004738-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004739
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004740- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4741 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4742 PySequence_Size().
4743
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004744- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4745
4746- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4747 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4748 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4749
4750- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4751 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4752
4753- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4754 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4755
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004756New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004757-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004758
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004759- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4760 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4761
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004762- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4763 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4764
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004765- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4766
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004767Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004768-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004769
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004770- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4771 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4772
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004773Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004774-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004775
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004776Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004777----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004778
4779- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4780 removed completely in the next release.
4781
4782- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4783 OSX.
4784
4785- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4786 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4787
4788- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4789
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004790
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004791What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004792===========================
4793
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004794*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4795
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004796Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004797--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004798
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004799- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004800 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004801 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004802 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4803 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004804 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4805 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004806 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4807 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004808
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004809- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4810 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4811
4812- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4813 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4814
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004815Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004816-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004817
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004818- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4819 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4820 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4821 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4822 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4823 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4824 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4825 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4826
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004827- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4828 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4829 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4830 example).
4831
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004832- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004833 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004834 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004835 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004836
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004837- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4838 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4839 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004840 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004841
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004842- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4843 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4844 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4845 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4846 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4847 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4848
4849 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4850
4851 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4852
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004853Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004854-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004855
4856- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4857
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004858- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4859
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004860- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4861 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004862
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004863- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4864 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4865 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4866 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4867 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4868 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004869 attributes.
4870
4871- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4872 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4873 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004874
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004875- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4876 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4877 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004878
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004879- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4880 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4881 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004882 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4883 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4884
4885- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4886 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004887
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004888Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004889-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004890
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004891- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4892 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4893
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004894- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4895 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4896 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4897 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4898
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004899- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4900 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4901 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4902 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4903
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004904 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4905 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4906 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4907 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4908 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4909 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4910 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4911 without losing information).
4912
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004913- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004914 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4915 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4916 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4917 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4918 module).
4919
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004920 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004921 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4922 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4923 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4924 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004925
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004926- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004927 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4928 encoding.
4929
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004930- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4931 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4932
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004933- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004934 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4935
4936- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4937 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4938 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4939 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4940
4941- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4942
4943- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4944 ON, and OFF.
4945
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004946- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4947 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4948
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004949Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004950-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004951
4952- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4953 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4954 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004955
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004956- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4957 been added: -X and -E.
4958
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004959Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004960-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004961
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004962- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4963 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4964
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004965C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004966-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004967
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004968- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4969 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4970 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4971 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4972 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4973
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004974- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4975 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4976 as long) arguments.
4977
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004978- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4979 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4980 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4981 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4982 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4983 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4984
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004985- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4986 input.
4987
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004988New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004989-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004990
4991Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004992-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004993
4994Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004995-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004996
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004997- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4998 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4999 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5000
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005001- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5002 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5003 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005004 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005005
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005006 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5007 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5008 import signal
5009 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005010
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005011 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005012 while 1:
5013 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005014 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005015 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5016 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5017 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5018 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005019
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005020
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005021What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5022===========================
5023
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005024*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5025
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005026Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005027--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005028
5029- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5030 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5031 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5032
5033- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5034 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5035 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5036 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5037 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5038 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5039 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005040
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005041- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005042 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005043 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5044 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5045 associate a docstring with a property.
5046
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005047- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5048 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5049 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5050 other built-in object types.
5051
5052- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5053 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5054 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5055 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5056 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5057
5058- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5059 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5060
5061- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5062 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005063 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005064 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5065 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5066 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5067 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5068 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5069
5070- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5071 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5072 class.
5073
5074- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5075 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5076 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5077 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5078
5079- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5080 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5081 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5082 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5083
5084- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5085 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5086
5087- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5088 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5089 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5090 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5091 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005092 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005093 with the same value as s.
5094
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005095- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5096
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005097Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005098----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005099
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005100- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5101
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005102- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5103 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5104 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5105 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5106 objects.
5107
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005108- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5109 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005110 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5111 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5112
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005113- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5114 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5115 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5116
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005117Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005118-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005119
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005120- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5121 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5122 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5123 by the instances.
5124
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005125- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5126 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5127 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5128
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005129- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5130 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5131 before the entire comparison is complete.
5132
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005133- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5134 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5135 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5136
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005137- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5138 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5139 getwriter().
5140
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005141- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5142 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5143
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005144- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005145 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5146 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5147
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005148- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5149 iterable object.
5150
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005151- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5152 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005153
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005154- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5155 authentication.
5156
5157- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5158 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005159
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005160- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005161 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5162 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5163 a sample driver.)
5164
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005165Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005166-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005167
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005168- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5169 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5170 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5171 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5172 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5173 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5174 kernel has large file support.
5175
5176- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5177 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5178 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5179 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5180 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5181
5182- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5183 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5184 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5185
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005186C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005187-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005188
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005189- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5190 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5191
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005192New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005193-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005194
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005195- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5196 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5197
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005198Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005199-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005200
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005201- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5202 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5203 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5204 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5205 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5206
5207- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5208 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5209 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5210 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5211
5212- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5213 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5214
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005215Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005216-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005217
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005218- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005219 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5220 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005221
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005222
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005223What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5224===========================
5225
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005226*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5227
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005228Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005229----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005230
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005231- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5232 big to represent as a C double.
5233
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005234- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5235 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5236 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5237 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5238 restriction).
5239
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005240- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5241 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5242 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5243 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5244 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5245
5246 >>> dir([])
5247 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5248 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5249 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5250 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5251 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5252 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5253 'reverse', 'sort']
5254
5255 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5256
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005257- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005258 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5259 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5260 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5261 OverflowError exception.
5262
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005263- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005264 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005265 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5266 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5267 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5268 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5269 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005270 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005271 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5272 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5273
5274 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5275 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5276 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5277 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005278
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005279- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005280 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5281 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5282 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5283 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5284 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5285 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5286 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5287 once it is created.
5288
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005289- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5290 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5291 (key, value) pairs.
5292
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005293- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005294 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5295 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5296
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005297- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5298 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5299 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5300 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5301 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005302
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005303- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005304 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5305 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5306
5307 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5308
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005309- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005310 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5311
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005312Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005313-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005314
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005315- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005316 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5317 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005318
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005319- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5320 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5321 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5322 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5323 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5324 in this area anymore).
5325
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005326- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5327 threading.Timer.
5328
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005329- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5330 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5331
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005332- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005333 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5334
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005335- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005336 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5337 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5338 converted to Python longs.
5339
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005340- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005341 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5342
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005343- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5344 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5345 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5346
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005347Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005348-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005349
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005350- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5351 division operators as per PEP 238.
5352
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005353Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005354-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005355
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005356- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5357 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5358 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5359 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5360
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005361C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005362-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005363
5364- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005365
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005366- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5367 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005368 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005369
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005370 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5371 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005372 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005373 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005374
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005375- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005376 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5377 module:
5378
5379 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005380
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005381 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5382 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005383
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005384 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5385 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005386
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005387 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5388
5389 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5390
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005391- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005392 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5393 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5394 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005395
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005396New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005397-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005398
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005399- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5400 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5401 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5402 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5403 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005404
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005405Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005406-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005407
5408Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005409-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005410
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005411- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5412 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5413 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5414 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005415 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5416 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5417 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5418 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5419 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005420
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005421- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005422 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5423
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005424
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005425What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5426===========================
5427
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005428*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5429
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005430Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005431-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005432
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005433- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5434 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5435
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005436- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5437 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5438 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005439
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005440- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5441 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5442 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5443 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005444
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005445- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5446
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005447- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005448
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005449Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005450-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005451
5452- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005453 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005454 the module docstring for details.
5455
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005456Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005457-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005458
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005459- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005460 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5461 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5462 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005463
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005464- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5465 Nick Mathewson.
5466
5467Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005468----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005469
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005470- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5471 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5472 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5473 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5474 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5475 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5476 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5477 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5478
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005479- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5480 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5481 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5482 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5483
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005484- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5485 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5486 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5487 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5488 come a long way).
5489
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005490- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5491 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5492 write filters for these warnings).
5493
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005494- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5495 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5496 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5497 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5498 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5499
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005500- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5501 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5502 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5503 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5504 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5505 older distribution.
5506
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005507Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005508-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005509
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005510- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5511 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005512 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005513
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005514- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5515 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5516 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5517
5518- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5519
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005520- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5521
5522- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5523
5524- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5525
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005526- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005527
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005528- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5529
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005530New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005531-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005532
5533C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005534-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005535
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005536- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5537 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5538 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5539 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5540 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5541 against buffer overruns.
5542
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005543- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005544 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5545 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005546 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5547 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5548 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5549
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005550- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5551 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5552 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5553 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5554 deprecated.
5555
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005556Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005557-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005558
5559- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5560 relevant is found.
5561
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005562
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005563What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005564===========================
5565
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005566*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5567
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005568Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005569----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005570
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005571- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5572 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5573 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5574 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5575 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5576 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5577 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5578 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005579 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005580 repaired.
5581
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005582- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005583 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005584 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5585 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5586 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5587 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5588 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5589 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5590 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5591 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5592
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005593- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5594 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5595 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5596 leading BMO character).
5597
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005598- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5599 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5600 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5601
5602 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5603 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5604 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005605
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005606 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5607 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5608 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5609 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5610 for various simple to use conversions.
5611
5612 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5613 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5614
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005615 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5616 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5617 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5618 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5619 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5620 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5621 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5622 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5623 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5624 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5625 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5626 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5627 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5628 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5629 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005630
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005631- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5632 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5633 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005634 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005635 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005636
5637 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005638 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5639 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5640 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5641 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5642 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005643 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5644 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005645
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005646 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5647 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5648 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005649 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005650
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005651- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5652 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5653 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5654 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5655 floating arithmetic,
5656
5657 x = 9007199254740992.0
5658 print long(x)
5659
5660 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5661 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5662 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5663 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5664 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5665 functions are of good quality).
5666
5667 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5668 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5669 algorithms to break.
5670
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005671- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5672 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5673 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5674 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5675 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5676 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5677 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5678 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5679 order.
5680
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005681- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5682 operation along the most common code paths.
5683
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005684- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5685 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5686
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005687- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5688 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5689 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5690 {}.update(UserDict())
5691
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005692- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5693 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5694 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5695 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5696 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5697 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5698 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5699 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5700
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005701- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005702 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005703
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005704 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005705 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5706 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005707 join() method of strings
5708 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005709 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5710 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005711 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005712 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005713
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005714- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5715 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5716
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005717- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5718 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5719
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005720- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5721 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5722 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5723 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5724
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005725- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5726 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005727 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005728 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5729 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005730
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005731- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5732
5733
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005734Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005735-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005736
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005737- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005738 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005739 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5740 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5741
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005742- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5743 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5744
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005745- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5746 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5747 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5748 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5749
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005750- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5751 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5752 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5753
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005754- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5755
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005756- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5757
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005758- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5759 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5760 that are still imported into string.py).
5761
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005762- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5763
5764- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5765 Now it does.
5766
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005767- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5768
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005769- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5770 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5771 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5772 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5773 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005774 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5775 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005776
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005777- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5778 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5779 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5780 'help(object)'.
5781
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005782Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005783-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005784
5785- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005786 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005787 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5788 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5789
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005790- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005791 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5792 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005793
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005794C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005795-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005796
5797- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5798 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005799
5800----
5801
5802**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**