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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
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000015- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
16 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
17 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
18
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000019- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
20 configure would break checking curses.h.
21
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000022- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
23 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
24
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000025- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
26
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000027- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
28
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000029- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
30
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000031- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
32 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
33
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000034- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
35 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
36 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
37
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000038- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
39 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000040 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000041
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000042- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
43 now encodes backslash correctly.
44
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000045- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
46
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000047- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
48 and long longs.
49
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000050- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
51 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
52 message in this case.
53
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000054- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
55 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
56 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
57 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
58 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
59
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000060- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000061
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000062- Speed up some Unicode operations.
63
64- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
65
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000066- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000067 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
68
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000069- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
70
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000071- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
72 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
73
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000074- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
75
76- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
77
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000078- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
79 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
80 was empty.
81
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000082- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
83 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
84
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000085- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000086 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000087
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000088- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
89 codes.
90
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000091- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
92 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
93 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
94
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000095- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
96 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
97
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000098- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000099 (fixes bug #1119418).
100
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000101- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
102
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000103- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
104 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
105
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000106- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
107 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
108 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
109
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000110- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
111
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000112- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
113 reference counts in some error exit cases.
114
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000115- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
116 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
117 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
118 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
119 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
120 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
121 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
122 realloc.
123
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000124- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
125 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
126
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000127- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
128 like their int counterparts.
129
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000130- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
131 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
132 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
133 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
134 for a longer write-up of the problem).
135
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000136- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
137 serializing floats.
138
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000139- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
140 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
141 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
142
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000143- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
144 278.
145
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000146- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
147 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
148 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
149 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000150 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000151 PyNumber_*().
152 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
153
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000154- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
155 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
156 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
157 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
158
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000159- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
160 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
161 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
162 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
163 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
164
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000165- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
166 disabled caused a crash.
167
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000168- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
169 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
170
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000171- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000172 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
173
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000174- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
175
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000176- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000177 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
178 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
179 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000180
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000181- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
182
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000183- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
184 returning None.
185
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000186- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000187 ('\') with a specific error message.
188
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000189- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
190
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000191- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
192 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
193
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000194- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000195 an ferror() call.
196
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000197- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
198 list.sort().
199
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000200- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
201 (2+3) --> (5).
202
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000203- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
204
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000205- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
206 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000207
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000208- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
209 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
210 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
211
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000212- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
213 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
214 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
215
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000216Extension Modules
217-----------------
218
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000219- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
220 than the system default domain.
221
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000222- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
223 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
224 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
225
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000226- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
227
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000228- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
229 before the env.
230
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000231- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
232
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000233- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
234
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000235- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
236 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
237 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
238
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000239- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
240 without prior setting of the userptr.
241
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000242- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
243
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000244- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
245
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000246- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
247 problem on AIX.
248
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000249- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
250
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000251- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
252
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000253- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
254
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000255- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
256 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
257
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000258- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
259 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
260
261- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
262
263- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000264
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000265- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
266 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
267
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000268- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
269
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000270- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
271 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
272
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000273- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
274 returns in cStringIO.c.
275
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000276- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
277 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
278
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000279- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
280
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000281- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
282
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000283- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
284 the file system encoding.
285
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000286- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
287 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000288
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000289- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
290
291- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000292 line without newlines.
293
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000294- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
295 on Windows.
296
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000297- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000298 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
299
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000300- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
301 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
302 for large or negative values.
303
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000304- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000305 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000306
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000307- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
308
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000309- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
310 if available on the platform.
311
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000312- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
313 available on the platform.
314
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000315- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
316 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
317
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000318- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
319
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000320- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
321 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
322 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
323
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000324- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
325
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000326- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
327 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
328
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000329- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000330 file size.
331
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000332- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
333
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000334- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
335 {remove_history,replace_history}
336
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000337- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
338 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000339
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000340- stat_float_times is now True.
341
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000342- array.array objects are now picklable.
343
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000344- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
345 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
346
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000347- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
348 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
349 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
350
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000351- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
352 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000353
354Library
355-------
356
Martin v. Löwisc81e3a62006-01-30 15:04:31 +0000357- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000358 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
359 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
360
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000361- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
362
363- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000364
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000365- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
366
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000367- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000368 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000369
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000370- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
371 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000372
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000373- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
374
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000375- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
376
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000377- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
378 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
379 LoadError subclasses IOError.
380
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000381- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000382 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
383 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
384 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
385 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
386
387 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
388 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
389 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
390 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
391 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000392
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000393- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
394 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
395 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
396
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000397- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
398
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000399- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
400
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000401- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
402 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
403 illegal argument)
404
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000405- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
406 is an error in the format string.
407
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000408- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
409
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000410- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000411 "parent" argument.
412
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000413- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
414 for padding.
415
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000416- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
417 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
418
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000419- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
420 to get the correct encoding.
421
422- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
423 languages.
424
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000425- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
426
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000427- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
428
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000429- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
430
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000431- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
432 functionality.
433
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000434- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
435
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000436- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
437 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
438
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000439- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
440 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
441 match the Content-Length header.
442
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000443- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
444
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000445- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
446 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000447 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000448
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000449- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
450
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000451- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
452
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000453- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
454 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
455
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000456- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
457 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
458 Tkdnd.
459
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000460- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
461 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
462
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000463- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
464 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
465
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000466- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000467 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
468
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000469- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
470 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
471
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000472- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
473 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
474
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000475- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000476 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000477
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000478- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
479
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000480- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
481 error messages.
482
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000483- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
484
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000485- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
486 Bug #1224621.
487
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000488- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
489 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
490 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
491 terminates by raising StopIteration.
492
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000493- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
494
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000495- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
496 component of the path.
497
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000498- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
499 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
500 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
501 class at all.
502
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000503- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
504 files to PyPI.
505
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000506- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
507 them to PyPI.
508
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000509- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
510 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
511 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
512 work as expected.
513
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000514- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
515 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
516
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000517- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000518 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
519
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000520- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
521
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000522- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
523 to build.
524
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000525- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
526 symbolic links on Windows.
527
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000528- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000529 profile.py if available.
530
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000531- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
532
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000533- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
534 in LWPCookieJar.
535
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000536- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
537
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000538- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
539
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000540- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
541
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000542- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
543
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000544- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
545
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000546- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
547
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000548- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
549
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000550- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
551
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000552- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
553 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
554 be exploited in various ways.
555
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000556- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000557 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
558
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000559- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
560 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
561
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000562- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000563 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
564
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000565- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
566
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000567- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
568
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000569- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
570
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000571- Enhancements to the csv module:
572
573 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000574 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000575 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000576 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
577 reporting.
578 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
579 dictates.
580 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000581 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000582 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000583 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
584 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000585 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
586 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000587 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000588 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
589 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
590 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
591 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
592 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
593 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
594 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
595 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
596 without first creating a dialect class.
597 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
598 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
599 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000600 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000601 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
602 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000603 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
604 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
605 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
606 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000607 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
608 This has been fixed.
609
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000610- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
611 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
612 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
613 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
614
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000615- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
616
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000617- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
618 (Bug #951915).
619
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000620- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
621 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
622 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000623 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000624
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000625- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
626
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000627- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
628 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
629
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000630- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
631
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000632- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
633
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000634- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
635
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000636- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
637
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000638- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
639
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000640- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
641 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
642 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
643
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000644- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000645 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000646
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000647- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
648 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
649 tokenizer with very long source lines.
650
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000651- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
652 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
653 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000654
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000655- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
656 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000657
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000658- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
659 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
660
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000661- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
662 correctly.
663
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000664- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
665 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
666 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
667 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
668 between two lines.
669
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000670- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
671 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
672 handlers.
673
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000674- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000675 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
676 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000677
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000678- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
679 considering it exactly like a '*'.
680
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000681- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
682 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000683
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000684- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
685
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000686- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
687 touch the recursion limit.
688
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000689Build
690-----
691
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000692- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
693
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000694- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
695 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
696
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000697- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
698
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000699- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
700 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
701
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000702- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
703 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
704
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000705- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
706 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
707 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000708 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000709
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000710- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
711 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
712 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
713
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000714- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
715
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000716- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
717 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
718
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000719- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
720 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
721 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
722 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
723 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
724 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
725 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
726 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
727
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000728- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
729 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
730 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
731 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
732
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000733C API
734-----
735
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000736- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
737
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000738- Removed PyRange_New().
739
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000740- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
741 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
742 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
743 mappings.
744
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000745
746Tests
747-----
748
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000749- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000750
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000751- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
752 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
753
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000754
755Documentation
756-------------
757
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000758- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
759
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000760- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
761 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
762
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000763- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
764
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000765- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
766
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000767- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
768
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000769- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
770
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000771- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
772
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000773- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
774
775- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
776
777- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
778
779- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
780
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000781- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
782 Closes bug #1166582.
783
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000784- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
785 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
786 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
787
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000788Mac
789---
790
791
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000792New platforms
793-------------
794
795- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
796
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000797
798Tools/Demos
799-----------
800
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000801- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
802 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
803 source files that need an encoding declaration.
804 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
805
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000806- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
807
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000808- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000809
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000810- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
811 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000812
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000813What's New in Python 2.4 final?
814===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000815
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000816*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000817
818Core and builtins
819-----------------
820
821- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
822 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
823 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
824
825
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000826What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
827==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000828
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000829*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000830
831Core and builtins
832-----------------
833
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000834- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
835 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
836 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
837
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000838
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000839Library
840-------
841
842- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
843 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
844 raised is re-raised.
845
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000846- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
847 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
848
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000849- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
850 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
851 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
852 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
853 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
854 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
855 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
856 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
857 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
858 by the slice are recomputed now.
859
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000860- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000861
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000862Build
863-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000864
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000865- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
866 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
867 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000868
869C API
870-----
871
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000872- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
873
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000874
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000875What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
876================================
877
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000878*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000879
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000880License
881-------
882
883The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
884is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
885changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
886Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
887intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
888durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
889the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
890License::
891
892 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
893
894says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
895to Python 2.1.1.
896
897The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
898License Version 2.
899
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000900Core and builtins
901-----------------
902
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000903- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
904 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
905 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
906 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
907 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
908 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
909 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000910 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000911 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
912 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
913
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000914- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000915
916Extension Modules
917-----------------
918
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000919- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
920 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
921 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
922 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000923
924Library
925-------
926
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000927- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
928 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
929 returned.
930
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000931- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
932
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000933- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
934 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
935
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000936- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
937
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000938- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
939 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000940
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000941- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
942
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000943- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
944
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000945- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000946 the source code is updated and reloaded.
947
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000948Build
949-----
950
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000951- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000952
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000953What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
954================================
955
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000956*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000957
958Core and builtins
959-----------------
960
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000961- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000962 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
963
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000964- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
965 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
966 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
967 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
968
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000969- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
970 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
971
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000972- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
973 constant.
974
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000975- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
976 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
977 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
978 large), and to anomalies such as
979 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
980 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
981 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
982 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000983
984Extension modules
985-----------------
986
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000987- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
988 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000989 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
990 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
991 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000992
993Library
994-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000995
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000996- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000997 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000998 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
999 --swig-cpp.
1000
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001001- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1002 it is set.
1003
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001004- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001005
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001006- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1007 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1008 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1009 Closes bug #1039270.
1010
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001011- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001012
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001013 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001014 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1015 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1016 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1017 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1018 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1019 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1020 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1021 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1022 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1023 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1024 + Updates to documentation.
1025
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001026- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1027 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1028 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1029 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1030
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001031- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001032
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001033- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1034 applications should use the getmember function.
1035
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001036- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1037
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001038- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1039 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1040 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1041 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1042 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1043 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1044 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1045 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1046 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1047
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001048- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1049 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001050 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001051
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001052- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1053 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1054 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1055 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1056 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1057 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1058 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1059 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001060
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001061- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1062 the new public features (of which there are many).
1063
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001064- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001065 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1066 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1067 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1068 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001069 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001070
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001071- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1072
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001073- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1074 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1075 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1076 options.
1077
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001078- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1079 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1080 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1081 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1082 conditions under which non-string values work.
1083
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001084Build
1085-----
1086
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001087- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1088 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1089 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1090
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001091- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1092 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1093 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1094 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1095 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001096
1097C API
1098-----
1099
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001100- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1101 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1102
1103- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1104
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001105- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1106 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1107 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1108 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1109 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1110 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1111 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1112 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1113 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1114
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001115- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1116
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001117- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1118 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1119 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001120
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001121Tests
1122-----
1123
1124- test__locale ported to unittest
1125
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001126Mac
1127---
1128
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001129- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1130 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1131 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001132
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001133Tools/Demos
1134-----------
1135
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001136- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1137 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1138 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1139 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1140 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001141
1142
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001143What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1144=================================
1145
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001146*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001147
1148Core and builtins
1149-----------------
1150
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001151- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001152 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1153
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001154- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1155 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1156 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1157 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1158 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1159 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1160 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1161 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001162 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1163 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1164 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1165 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1166 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001167
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001168- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1169 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1170 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1171 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1172 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1173
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001174- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1175
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001176- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1177 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1178
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001179- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1180 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1181 modified the list.
1182
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001183- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1184 functions is now writable.
1185
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001186- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1187 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1188 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1189 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1190
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001191- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1192 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1193 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1194 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1195 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001196
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001197- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1198 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1199
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001200Extension modules
1201-----------------
1202
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001203- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1204
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001205- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1206 data.
1207
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001208- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1209 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1210 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1211 supposed to have been truncated away.
1212
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001213- Added socket.socketpair().
1214
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001215- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1216 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1217
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001218- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001219 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1220
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001221Library
1222-------
1223
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001224- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001225 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001226
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001227- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1228 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1229
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001230- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1231 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1232
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001233- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1234
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001235- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1236 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001237
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001238- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1239 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1240
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001241- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1242
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001243- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1244
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001245- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1246
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001247- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1248 Percivall.
1249
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001250- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1251 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1252
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001253- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1254 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1255 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001256 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001257
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001258- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1259 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1260 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1261 and exponent.
1262
1263- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1264
1265- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001266 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001267 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1268
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001269- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1270 to the readline module.
1271
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001272- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001273 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1274 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001275
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001276- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1277 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1278 contains symlinks.
1279
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001280- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1281 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1282
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001283- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1284 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1285 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1286
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001287- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1288 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1289 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1290 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1291 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1292 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1293 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1294 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1295 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1296 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1297 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1298 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1299 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1300
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001301- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1302
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001303Tools/Demos
1304-----------
1305
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001306- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1307 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1308
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001309- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1310
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001311Build
1312-----
1313
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001314- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1315 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1316 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1317 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1318 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1319 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1320 plans to do so.
1321
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001322- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1323 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1324
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001325- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1326 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1327
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001328- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1329 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1330
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001331- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1332 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1333
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001334- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1335 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1336
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001337C API
1338-----
1339
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001340..
1341
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001342Documentation
1343-------------
1344
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001345- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1346 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1347
1348- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1349 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1350 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001351
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001352New platforms
1353-------------
1354
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001355- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1356
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001357Tests
1358-----
1359
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001360..
1361
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001362Windows
1363-------
1364
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001365- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1366 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1367 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1368 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1369 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1370 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1371 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1372 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1373 the problem.
1374
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001375Mac
1376---
1377
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001378..
1379
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001380
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001381What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1382=================================
1383
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001384*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001385
1386Core and builtins
1387-----------------
1388
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001389- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1390 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1391 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1392 sensitive code.
1393
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001394- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001395 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001396
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001397 @staticmethod
1398 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001399
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001400 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001401
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001402- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1403 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1404 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1405 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1406 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1407 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1408 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1409 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1410 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1411 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1412 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1413
1414 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1415 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1416 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1417 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1418 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1419 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1420 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1421
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001422- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1423 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1424
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001425- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001426 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001427
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001428- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001429 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001430 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1431
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001432- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001433 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1434 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1435
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001436- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1437 types that support garbage collection.
1438
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001439- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1440
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001441- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1442 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1443 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1444 Jython.
1445
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001446- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1447
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001448- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1449 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1450
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001451- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1452 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1453 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001454
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001455- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1456 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1457 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1458
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001459Extension modules
1460-----------------
1461
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001462- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1463
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001464Library
1465-------
1466
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001467- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1468 TIS-620
1469
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001470- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1471 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1472 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1473 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1474 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1475 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1476 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1477 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1478 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1479 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1480
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001481- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1482
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001483- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1484 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1485 same as when the argument is omitted).
1486 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1487
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001488- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1489
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001490- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1491 schemes are offered.
1492
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001493- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1494
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001495- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1496 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1497 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1498
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001499- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1500
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001501- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1502 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1503
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001504- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1505 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1506 when dummy_threading is being used.
1507
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001508- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1509 from a tarfile.
1510
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001511- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001512 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001513
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001514- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1515 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1516 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1517 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1518
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001519- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1520 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1521
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001522- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1523 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1524 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1525 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1526 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1527 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1528 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1529 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1530 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1531 by some other method in progress).
1532
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001533- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1534 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1535 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001536
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001537- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1538
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001539- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1540 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1541 AM Kuchling.
1542
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001543- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1544 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1545 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1546
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001547- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1548 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1549 instead of unsigned.
1550
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001551- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001552 no longer part of the public API.
1553
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001554- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1555 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1556 string methods of the same name).
1557
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001558- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001559 SF patch 945642.
1560
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001561- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1562
1563 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1564
1565 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1566 DocTestSuites.
1567
1568- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1569 that provide thread-local data.
1570
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001571- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1572 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1573
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001574- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1575
1576- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1577 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1578 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1579
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001580- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1581
1582 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1583 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1584 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001585
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001586 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1587 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1588 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1589 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1590
1591 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1592 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1593
1594 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1595 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1596 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1597 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1598
1599 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1600 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1601 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1602 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1603 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1604
1605 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1606 wrapping help output.
1607
1608 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1609 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1610 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001611
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001612C API
1613-----
1614
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001615- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1616 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1617 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1618 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1619 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1620 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1621 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1622 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1623 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1624 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1625 its visible semantics have not changed.
1626
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001627- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1628 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1629
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001630Documentation
1631-------------
1632
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001633- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001634
1635 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001636 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001637
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001638 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001639
1640 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1641
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001642- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001643
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001644Tests
1645-----
1646
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001647- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001648 platforms that use the Makefile.
1649
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001650- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1651 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1652 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1653
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001654
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001655What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1656=================================
1657
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001658*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001659
1660Core and builtins
1661-----------------
1662
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001663- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1664 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1665 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1666 objects now (one object instead of three).
1667
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001668- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1669 Windows DLLs.
1670
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001671- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1672 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001673
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001674- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1675 a new .pyc magic.
1676
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001677- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1678 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1679 be there.
1680
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001681- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1682 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1683 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1684
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001685- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1686 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1687 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1688
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001689- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1690
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001691- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1692 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1693 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001694
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001695- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1696 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1697
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001698- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1699
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001700- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001701 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001702
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001703- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1704
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001705- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1706
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001707- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1708 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1709
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001710- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1711 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1712 Fixes bug #858016 .
1713
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001714- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1715 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1716 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1717
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001718- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1719 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1720 improves their performance (about 35%).
1721
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001722- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1723 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1724 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1725
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001726- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1727 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1728 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1729 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1730
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001731- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1732 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001733 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001734 length is not known).
1735
1736- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1737 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001738 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1739 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001740 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1741
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001742- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1743 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1744
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001745- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1746 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1747 keyword arguments.
1748
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001749- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1750 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1751 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1752
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001753- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1754 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1755 cases.
1756
1757- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1758 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1759 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1760 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1761 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1762 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1763 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1764 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1765 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1766 a release build.
1767
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001768- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1769 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1770
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001771- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001772 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001773
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001774- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1775 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1776 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1777 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1778 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1779 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1780 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1781 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1782 destroyed.
1783
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001784- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1785 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1786 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1787 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1788 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1789 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1790 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1791 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1792
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001793- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1794 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1795 character other than a space.
1796
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001797- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1798 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1799 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1800 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1801 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1802 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1803 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1804 attributes with the same name.
1805
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001806- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1807 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1808 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1809 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1810 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1811 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1812 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1813 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1814 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1815 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1816 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1817 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1818 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1819 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001820
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001821- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1822 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1823 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1824 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1825 This has been repaired.
1826
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001827- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1828
1829- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1830
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001831- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1832 over a sequence.
1833
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001834- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001835 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001836
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001837- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1838
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001839- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1840 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1841 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1842 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1843 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1844 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1845 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1846 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1847
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001848- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1849 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1850 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1851
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001852- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1853 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1854 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1855 freelist.
1856
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001857- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1858 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1859
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001860- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1861 number.
1862
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001863- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1864 a TypeError exception.
1865
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001866- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1867 820195.
1868
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001869- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1870 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1871 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1872
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001873- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001874 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1875 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001876
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001877- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1878 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1879 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1880
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001881- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1882 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001883 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001884
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001885- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001886 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1887 the first call.
1888
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001889
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001890Extension modules
1891-----------------
1892
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001893- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1894 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1895
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001896- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1897 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1898 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1899 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1900 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1901 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1902 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001903
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001904- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1905
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001906- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1907
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001908- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1909 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1910
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001911- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1912 fewer false positives.
1913
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001914- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1915 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1916
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001917- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001918 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1919
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001920- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001921 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001922 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001923 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1924 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001925
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001926- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1927 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1928 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1929 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1930
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001931- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1932 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1933 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1934 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1935 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1936 #897625.
1937
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001938- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1939 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1940
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001941- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1942 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1943 and pops on either side of the deque.
1944
1945- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1946 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1947
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001948- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1949 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1950 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1951 other functions that expect a function argument.
1952
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001953- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1954
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001955- os.getsid was added.
1956
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001957- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1958 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1959 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1960
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001961- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1962
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001963- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1964
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001965- readline.clear_history was added.
1966
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001967- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1968
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001969- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1970
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001971- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1972
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001973- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1974
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001975- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1976
1977- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1978
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001979- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1980
1981- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1982
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001983- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1984 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1985 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1986
1987- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1988 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1989 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1990 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1991 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1992 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1993 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1994
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001995- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1996 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1997 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1998 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001999
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002000- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002001 iterators from a single iterable.
2002
2003- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2004 of raising a TypeError exception.
2005
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002006- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2007 as parameter.
2008
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002009Library
2010-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002011
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002012- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2013
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002014- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2015 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2016 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002017
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002018- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2019 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2020 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002021
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002022- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002023
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002024- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2025 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002026
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002027- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2028 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2029
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002030- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2031
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002032- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002033 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002034
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002035- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002036 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002037
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002038- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2039
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002040- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2041 on cygwin and mingw32.
2042
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002043- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2044
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002045- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2046 module.
2047
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002048- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2049 installation scheme for all platforms.
2050
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002051- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002052 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002053
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002054- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2055 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2056 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2057
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002058- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2059 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2060 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2061
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002062- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2063
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002064- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2065
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002066- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2067 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2068
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002069- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2070 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2071 type pattern with the same value exists.
2072
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002073- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2074 when run from the command prompt).
2075
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002076- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2077 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2078
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002079- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2080 default sort).
2081
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002082- Added global runctx function to profile module
2083
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002084- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2085
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002086- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2087
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002088- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2089
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002090- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002091 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2092 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2093 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2094 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2095 accordingly.
2096
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002097- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2098 decoding standards.
2099
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002100- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2101 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2102 called for all requests.
2103
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002104- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2105 they are passed to the compiler.
2106
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002107- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2108 indent, width and depth.
2109
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002110- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2111 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2112
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002113- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2114 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2115
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002116- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2117
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002118- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2119
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002120- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2121
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002122- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2123 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2124
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002125- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002126 for better performance.
2127
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002128- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002129
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002130- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2131 a string).
2132
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002133- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2134
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002135- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2136
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002137- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2138
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002139- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2140
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002141- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2142 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2143 list of fieldnames.
2144
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002145- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2146 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2147
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002148- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2149
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002150- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2151 empty lists.
2152
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002153- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2154 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2155 and shelves.
2156
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002157- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2158 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2159
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002160- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002161 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2162 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002163
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002164- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2165 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002166 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002167
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002168- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002169 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2170 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2171
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002172- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2173 and removed in Py2.4.
2174
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002175- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2176
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002177- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2178
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002179Tools/Demos
2180-----------
2181
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002182- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2183 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2184
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002185- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2186
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002187- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2188 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2189 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2190 destination in situations where both files are given.
2191
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002192- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2193 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2194 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2195 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2196
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002197- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2198
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002199- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2200 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2201 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2202 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2203 now.
2204
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002205- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2206 in effect
2207
2208- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2209 C-c C-h
2210
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002211- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2212 -d option was given.
2213
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002214Build
2215-----
2216
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002217- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2218 build under OS X.
2219
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002220- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2221 --enable-profiling.
2222
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002223- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2224 is configured --with-tsc.
2225
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002226- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2227 on AMD64.
2228
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002229- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2230 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2231
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002232- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2233 removed.
2234
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002235- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2236 supported (see PEP 11).
2237
2238- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2239
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002240- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2241
2242- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2243 (see PEP 11).
2244
2245- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2246 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2247
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002248C API
2249-----
2250
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002251- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2252 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2253 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2254
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002255- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2256 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2257 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2258 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2259
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002260- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2261 generator objects.
2262
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002263- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2264 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002265 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2266 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002267
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002268- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2269 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2270
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002271- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2272 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2273 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2274 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2275 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2276
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002277- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2278 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2279 about 10% faster.
2280
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002281- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2282 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2283
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002284- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2285 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2286 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2287 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2288
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002289Windows
2290-------
2291
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002292- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2293 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2294 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2295 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2296
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002297- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2298 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2299 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2300
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002301
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002302What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2303===============================
2304
2305*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2306
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002307IDLE
2308----
2309
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002310- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2311 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2312 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2313 context-menu actions.
2314
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002315- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2316 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2317 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2318 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2319 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2320 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2321 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2322 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2323 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2324
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002325
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002326What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2327=============================================
2328
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002329*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002330
2331Core and builtins
2332-----------------
2333
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002334- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002335 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002336 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2337
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002338Extension modules
2339-----------------
2340
2341- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2342 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2343 than once. This has been fixed.
2344
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002345- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2346 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2347 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2348 call.
2349
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002350- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2351
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002352Library
2353-------
2354
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002355- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2356 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2357
2358- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2359 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2360 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2361 restored.
2362
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002363IDLE
2364----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002365
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002366- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002367
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002368Build
2369-----
2370
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002371- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2372 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2373
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002374C API
2375-----
2376
2377Windows
2378-------
2379
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002380- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2381 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2382
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002383- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2384
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002385Mac
2386---
2387
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002388- Various fixes to pimp.
2389
2390- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2391
2392- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2393 more problems than it solves.
2394
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002395
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002396What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2397=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002398
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002399*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2400
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002401Core and builtins
2402-----------------
2403
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002404- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2405 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2406
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002407- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2408 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002409 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002410
2411- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2412 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2413 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002414 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002415
2416- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2417 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002418
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002419- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2420 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2421 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2422
2423- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002424 770247.
2425
2426- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002427
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002428Extension modules
2429-----------------
2430
2431- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2432 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2433
2434- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2435
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002436- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2437
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002438- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2439 contained within the _strptime module.
2440
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002441- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2442 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2443
2444- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002445 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2446
2447- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2448 the find_class attribute, if present.
2449
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002450- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002451
2452 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2453 (SF bug 763298).
2454
2455 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002456 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2457 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2458 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002459
2460 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2461
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002462Library
2463-------
2464
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002465- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2466
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002467- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2468 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2469 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2470 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2471 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2472 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2473 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2474 or Tester().
2475
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002476- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2477 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2478 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2479 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2480 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2481 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2482 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2483 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2484 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002485
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002486 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002487
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002488- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2489 weren't before was an oversight.
2490
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002491- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2492 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2493
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002494- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2495 when there are no lines.
2496
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002497- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2498 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2499
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002500- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2501 to child processes.
2502
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002503- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2504
2505- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2506
2507- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2508 xmlrpclib.
2509
2510- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2511 responses.
2512
2513- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2514 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2515
2516- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2517 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2518 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2519
2520- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2521 used as patterns.
2522
2523- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2524 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2525 than Tk 8.3.
2526
2527- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2528
2529- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002530
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002531Tools/Demos
2532-----------
2533
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002534- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2535
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002536- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2537
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002538- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002539
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002540Build
2541-----
2542
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002543- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2544
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002545- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2546
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002547- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2548 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002549
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002550- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2551 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2552 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002553
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002554C API
2555-----
2556
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002557- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2558 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2559
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002560Windows
2561-------
2562
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002563- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2564 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2565 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2566 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2567 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2568 Python exception ::
2569
2570 thread.error: can't start new thread
2571
2572 is raised now.
2573
2574- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2575 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2576 instead of from DLL teardown.
2577
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002578Mac
2579---
2580
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002581- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002582 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002583 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2584 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2585 the executable in the bundle.
2586
2587- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002588
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002589- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2590
2591- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2592 on Panther.
2593
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002594What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2595================================
2596
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002597*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002598
2599Core and builtins
2600-----------------
2601
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002602- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2603 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2604 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2605 with the -i option.
2606
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002607- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2608 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2609
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002610- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2611 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2612
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002613- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2614 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2615 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2616 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2617 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2618 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2619 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2620 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2621 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2622 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2623 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2624 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2625 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002626
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002627- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2628 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2629 embedded in a lambda expression.
2630
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002631- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2632 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2633 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2634 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2635 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2636
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002637- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2638 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2639 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2640
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002641- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2642 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2643
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002644- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2645 It's writable again.
2646
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002647- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2648 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2649 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002650 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002651
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002652- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2653 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2654 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2655
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002656Extension modules
2657-----------------
2658
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002659- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2660 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2661
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002662- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2663 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2664 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2665 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2666
2667- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2668 collection.
2669
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002670- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2671 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2672 unique within a single program run.
2673
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002674- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2675 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2676
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002677- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2678 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2679
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002680- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2681 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002682
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002683- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2684
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002685- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2686 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2687
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002688- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2689 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2690 for many BSD-derived systems.
2691
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002692
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002693Library
2694-------
2695
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002696- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2697 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2698 primary ones:
2699
2700 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2701 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2702 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2703
2704 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2705 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2706 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2707 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2708 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2709 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2710
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002711- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2712 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2713 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2714 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2715 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2716 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2717 argument.
2718
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002719- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2720 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2721 in the archive.
2722
2723- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2724 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2725
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002726- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2727 569574).
2728
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002729- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2730 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2731 no more.
2732
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002733- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2734 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2735 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2736 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2737 code coverage.
2738
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002739- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2740 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2741 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002742 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2743 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002744
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002745- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2746 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2747 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002748 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002749
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002750- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2751
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002752- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2753 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2754 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2755 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2756
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002757- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2758 handling.
2759
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002760- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2761 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2762
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002763- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2764 in socket.py.
2765
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002766- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2767
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002768- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2769 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2770 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2771 opener with proxy support.
2772
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002773- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2774
2775- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2776
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002777Tools/Demos
2778-----------
2779
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002780- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2781
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002782- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2783
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002784- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2785 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002786
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002787- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2788 files.
2789
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002790Build
2791-----
2792
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002793- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002794 different root directory.
2795
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002796C API
2797-----
2798
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002799- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2800 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2801 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2802 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2803 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2804 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2805 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2806 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2807 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2808 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2809
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002810- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2811 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2812 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2813 from Python.
2814
2815
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002816New platforms
2817-------------
2818
2819None this time.
2820
2821Tests
2822-----
2823
2824- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2825 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2826
2827Windows
2828-------
2829
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002830- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2831
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002832- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2833 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2834 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2835 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2836 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2837 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2838 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2839 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2840 that's what it's for.
2841
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002842Mac
2843---
2844
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002845- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2846 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2847 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2848 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002849- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2850 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2851- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002852
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002853SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2854------------------------------------
2855
2856430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2857598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2858622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2859661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2860683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2861697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2862713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2863724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2864727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2865729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2866730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2867731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2868732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2869733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2870735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2871740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2872744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2873745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2874747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2875749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2876751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2877753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2878755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2879757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2880760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2881
2882
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002883What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2884================================
2885
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002886*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002887
2888Core and builtins
2889-----------------
2890
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002891- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2892 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2893
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002894- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2895 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2896 and cannot be strings).
2897
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002898- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2899 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2900 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2901 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2902
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002903- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2904 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2905 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2906 Python itself.
2907
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002908- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2909 the referenced object, if it has one.
2910
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002911- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2912 the thread started at
2913 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2914
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002915- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2916 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2917 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2918 placed on a list index.
2919
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002920- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2921 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2922 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2923 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2924
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002925- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2926 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2927 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2928 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2929 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2930 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2931 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2932
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002933- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2934 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2935 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2936 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2937 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2938
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002939- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2940 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002941
2942- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2943 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2944 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2945 #693195.)
2946
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002947- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2948 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002949
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002950- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002951 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002952 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2953 interpreter executions, would fail.
2954
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002955- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002956 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002957 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002958
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002959Extension modules
2960-----------------
2961
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002962- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2963 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2964 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2965 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2966
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002967- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2968 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2969
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002970- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2971 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2972 and Greg Chapman.)
2973
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002974- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2975 recursively.
2976
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002977- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002978 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2979 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2980 leaks.
2981
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002982- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2983
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002984- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2985 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2986 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2987 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2988 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2989 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2990 #705836.
2991
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002992- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002993 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2994
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002995- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2996 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2997 See SF bug #692416.
2998
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002999- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3000 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3001
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003002- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3003 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3004 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003005
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003006- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003007 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3008 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3009
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003010- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3011 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3012 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3013 timeouts to work properly.
3014
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003015Library
3016-------
3017
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003018- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3019 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3020 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3021 future release.
3022
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003023- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3024 for querying platform dependent features.
3025
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003026- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003027
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003028- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3029 pickle protocol versions.
3030
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003031- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3032 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3033 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3034
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003035- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3036
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003037- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3038 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3039 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3040 modules.
3041
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003042- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3043 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3044 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3045
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003046- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3047 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3048
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003049- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3050 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3051 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3052
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003053- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003054 MS Office extensions.
3055
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003056- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3057 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3058
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003059- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3060 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3061
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003062- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3063 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3064 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3065 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3066 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3067 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3068
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003069- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3070 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3071 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003072
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003073- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3074 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3075 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3076
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003077- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3078
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003079- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3080 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3081 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3082
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003083Tools/Demos
3084-----------
3085
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003086- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3087 See the module docstring for details.
3088
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003089Build
3090-----
3091
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003092- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3093 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003094
3095C API
3096-----
3097
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003098- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3099
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003100- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3101 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3102 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3103
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003104- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3105 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003106
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003107 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3108 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3109 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003110
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003111- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003112 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3113
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003114- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3115 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3116 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003117
3118New platforms
3119-------------
3120
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003121None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003122
3123Tests
3124-----
3125
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003126- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3127 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003128
3129Windows
3130-------
3131
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003132- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3133 function.
3134
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003135- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3136 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003137
3138Mac
3139---
3140
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003141- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3142 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003143
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003144- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3145 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003146
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003147- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3148 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3149 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003150
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003151- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003152 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3153 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003154
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003155- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3156 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003157
3158
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003159What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3160=================================
3161
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003162*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003163
3164Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003165-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003166
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003167- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3168 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3169 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3170
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003171- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3172 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3173 (SF patch #664376.)
3174
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003175- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3176 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3177 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3178 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3179 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3180 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003181 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003182
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003183- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3184 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3185 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3186 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003187 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003188
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003189- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3190 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3191 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3192 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3193 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3194 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3195 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3196 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3197 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3198 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3199 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3200
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003201- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3202 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3203 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3204 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3205 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3206 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3207
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003208- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3209 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3210
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003211- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3212 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3213 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3214 case.)
3215
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003216- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3217 passed as unicode strings.
3218
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003219- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3220 See SF bug #683467.
3221
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003222- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3223 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3224
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003225- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3226
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003227- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3228
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003229- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3230 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3231 arguments.
3232
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003233- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3234 See SF bug #667147.
3235
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003236- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003237 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003238 See SF bug #676155.
3239
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003240- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003241 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003242 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3243 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3244 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3245 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3246 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3247 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003248
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003249Extension modules
3250-----------------
3251
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003252- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3253 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3254 tp_as_number pointer.
3255
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003256- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3257 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3258 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3259 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3260 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3261
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003262- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3263
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003264- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3265
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003266- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003267 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003268 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3269 patch #678531.)
3270
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003271- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3272 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3273
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003274- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3275 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3276
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003277- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3278
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003279- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3280 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3281 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3282
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003283- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3284
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003285- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3286 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3287
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003288- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003289
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003290- datetime changes:
3291
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003292 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3293
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003294 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3295 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3296 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3297 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3298 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3299 now.
3300
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003301 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003302 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3303 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003304
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003305 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003306 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003307 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3308 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3309 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3310 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003311
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003312 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3313 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3314 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003315 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3316
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003317 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3318 by a later example coded by Guido.
3319
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003320 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003321 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3322 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3323 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003324 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3325 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3326
3327 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3328 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3329 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3330 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3331 tzinfo subclass instance.
3332
3333 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3334 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3335 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3336 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3337 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3338 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3339 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3340 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003341
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003342 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3343 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3344 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3345 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3346 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003347 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3348
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003349 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003350
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003351 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3352 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3353 as a naive datetime object.
3354
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003355 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3356 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3357 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3358
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003359 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3360 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3361 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3362 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3363 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3364 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3365 comparison.
3366
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003367 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3368 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3369 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3370 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003371 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003372
3373 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003374
3375 and ::
3376
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003377 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3378
3379 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3380 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3381 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3382 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3383
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003384 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3385 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3386 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3387 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3388 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3389
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003390 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3391 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003392 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3393 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003394
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003395Library
3396-------
3397
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003398- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3399 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3400
3401- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3402 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3403 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3404 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3405 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3406 See PEP 307 for details.
3407
3408- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3409 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3410
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003411- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3412 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003413 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003414 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3415 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003416 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003417
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003418- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3419 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3420
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003421- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3422 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3423 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3424
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003425- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3426
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003427- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3428 exception.
3429
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003430- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3431 class.
3432
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003433- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3434 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3435 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3436
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003437- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3438 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3439
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003440- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003441 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3442 See SF bug #659228.
3443
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003444- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3445 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3446 See SF patch #651082.
3447
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003448- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003449
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003450- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3451 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3452
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003453- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003454 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003455
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003456- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3457 DOS paths from other platforms.
3458
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003459Tools/Demos
3460-----------
3461
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003462- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3463 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3464 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3465 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3466 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3467 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3468 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3469 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3470 example:
3471
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003472 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3473 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003474
3475 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3476
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003477
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003478Build
3479-----
3480
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003481- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3482 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3483 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003484 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3485
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003486 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3487
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003488- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3489 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3490 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3491 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3492 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3493 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3494 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3495 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3496 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3497
3498- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3499 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3500 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3501 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3502
3503- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3504 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3505
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003506C API
3507-----
3508
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003509- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3510 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003511
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003512- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3513 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3514 tp_as_number pointer.
3515
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003516- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3517 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3518 (SF #681367)
3519
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003520- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3521 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3522 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3523 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003524
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003525Tests
3526-----
3527
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003528- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003529 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3530 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3531 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3532 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3533 pydoc.)
3534
3535- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3536
3537- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003538
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003539Windows
3540-------
3541
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003542- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3543 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3544 time).
3545
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003546- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3547 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3548
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003549- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3550 release without strong cryptography.
3551
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003552- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003553 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003554
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003555- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3556 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3557
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003558Mac
3559---
3560
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003561- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3562 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003563
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003564- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3565 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3566 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003567
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003568- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3569 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003570
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003571- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3572 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3573 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3574 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003575
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003576- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003577 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3578 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3579 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003580
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003581
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003582What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003583=================================
3584
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003585*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003586
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003587Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003588--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003589
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003590- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3591
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003592- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3593 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003594 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003595 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003596 a different meaning than before.
3597
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003598- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003599 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003600 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003601
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003602- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003603 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003604 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003605
3606- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3607 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3608 and deallocation.
3609
3610- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3611 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3612
3613- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3614 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3615 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3616 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3617 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3618
3619- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3620 now detected by the garbage collector.
3621
3622- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3623 [SF bug 519621]
3624
3625- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3626 identifier.
3627
3628- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3629 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3630 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3631 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3632 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3633 [SF bug 563060]
3634
3635- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3636 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3637 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3638 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3639 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3640
3641- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3642 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3643 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3644
3645- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3646
3647- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3648 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3649 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3650 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3651 state of the slots would be lost.)
3652
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003653Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003654-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003655
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003656- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003657 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3658 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3659 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3660 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003661 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3662 Jython 2.1.
3663
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003664- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003665 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003666 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3667 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3668 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3669 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3670 these, see PEP 302.
3671
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003672- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3673 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3674 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3675
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003676- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3677 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3678 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3679
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003680- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3681 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3682 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3683
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003684- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3685 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3686 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3687 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3688 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3689 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3690 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3691 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3692 releases or implementations.
3693
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003694- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003695 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3696 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003697
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003698- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3699 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3700
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003701- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3702 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3703 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3704
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003705- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3706 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3707
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003708- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3709 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003710 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3711 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003712
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003713- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3714 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3715 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3716 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3717 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3718
3719 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3720 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3721 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3722 pattern.
3723
3724 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3725 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3726 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3727 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3728
3729 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3730 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3731 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3732 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3733 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3734 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3735
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003736- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3737 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3738 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3739 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3740 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3741 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3742 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3743 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003744
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003745- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3746 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3747 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3748 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3749 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003750 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3751 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3752 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3753 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3754 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3755 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3756 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003757
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003758- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3759 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3760
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003761- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3762 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3763 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3764 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3765 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3766 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3767 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3768 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3769 to Zack Weinberg!
3770
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003771- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3772 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3773 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3774 type. This has been fixed now.
3775
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003776- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3777 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3778 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3779
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003780- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3781 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3782 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3783 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3784 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3785 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3786 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3787 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003788 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003789
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003790- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3791 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3792 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003793
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003794- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3795 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3796 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3797 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3798 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3799 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3800 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3801 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003802 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003803 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3804 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3805
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003806- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3807 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3808 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3809 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3810 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3811 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3812 this.)
3813
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003814- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3815 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003816 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003817 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003818 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3819 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003820 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3821 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003822
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003823- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3824 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3825 currently running.
3826
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003827- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3828 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3829 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3830 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3831
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003832- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3833 as directory names.
3834
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003835- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3836 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3837
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003838- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3839 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3840
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003841- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003842 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3843 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003844
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003845- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3846 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3847 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3848 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3849 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3850
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003851- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3852 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3853 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3854 removed.
3855
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003856- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3857 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3858 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3859
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003860- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3861 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3862 to __debug__.
3863
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003864- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3865 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3866 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3867
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003868- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3869 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3870 deprecated now.
3871
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003872- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3873 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3874 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003875
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003876- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3877 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3878 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3879 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3880 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003881
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003882- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3883 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3884
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003885- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3886 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3887 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003888 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003889 is backward compatible.
3890
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003891- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3892 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3893 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3894 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3895 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3896
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003897- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3898 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3899 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3900 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3901 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3902 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003903
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003904- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3905 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3906
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003907- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3908 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3909
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003910- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3911 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3912 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3913 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3914 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3915
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003916- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3917 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3918 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3919
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003920- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003921 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3922
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003923- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3924 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3925 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003926
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003927- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3928 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3929
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003930- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3931 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3932 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3933
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003934- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3935
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003936Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003937-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003938
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003939- Added three operators to the operator module:
3940 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3941 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3942 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3943
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003944- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3945
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003946- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3947 archives.
3948
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003949- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3950 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3951 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3952
3953 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3954
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003955- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3956 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3957 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003958 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003959
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003960- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3961 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3962 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3963 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003964 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3965 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3966 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3967 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003968
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003969- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3970 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003971
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003972- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3973
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003974- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3975 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3976
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003977- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3978 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3979 supported.
3980
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003981- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3982
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003983- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3984 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003985
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003986- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3987 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3988
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003989- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3990
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003991- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3992 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3993
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003994- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3995 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3996 functions but callable type objects.
3997
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003998- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003999 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004000 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004001
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004002- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4003 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004004
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004005- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4006 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004007
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004008- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4009 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4010 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4011 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4012
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004013- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4014 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004015
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004016- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4017 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4018 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4019 and __imul__.
4020
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004021- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004022 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4023 is called.
4024
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004025- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4026 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4027 interpreter was compiled.
4028
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004029- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4030 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4031 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004032 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004033 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4034 1, not 2.
4035
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004036- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4037 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4038 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4039 limit.
4040
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004041- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4042 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4043 bug #623464.
4044
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004045- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4046 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4047 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4048 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4049
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004050Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004051-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004052
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004053- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4054
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004055- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4056 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4057 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4058 with Python 2.3a2.
4059
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004060- os.path exposes getctime.
4061
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004062- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004063 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004064 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004065 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004066 unit tests of floating point results.
4067
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004068- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4069 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4070 has been increased.
4071
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004072- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4073 executed.
4074
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004075- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4076 postinstallation script.
4077
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004078- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4079 test the current module.
4080
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004081- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004082 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4083 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4084 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4085 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4086
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004087- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004088 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004089 Ward's Optik package.
4090
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004091- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4092 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4093 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4094 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4095
4096- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4097 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004098 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004099
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004100- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4101 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4102 shelf are binary pickles.
4103
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004104- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4105 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4106
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004107- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4108 modules are iterators now.
4109
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004110- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4111 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4112 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4113 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4114 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4115 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004116
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004117- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4118 with their entity value.
4119
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004120- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4121
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004122- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4123 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004124
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004125- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4126 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004127 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004128
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004129- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4130 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4131 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4132 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4133 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4134 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4135 main():
4136
4137 import locale
4138 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4139
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004140- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4141 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4142
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004143- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4144 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4145 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4146 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4147 to the new standard.
4148
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004149- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4150 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4151 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4152 an extension to the database.
4153
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004154- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4155 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4156 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4157 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004158 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004159
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004160- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004161 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004162
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004163- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4164 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4165 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4166 bounded integers.
4167
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004168- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4169 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4170 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4171 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4172 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4173 in existence.
4174
4175 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4176 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4177 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4178 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4179 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4180 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4181
4182 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4183 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4184 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4185 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4186
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004187- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4188 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4189 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4190
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004191- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4192
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004193- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4194 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4195 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4196 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4197
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004198- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4199 argument.
4200
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004201- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4202 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4203 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4204 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4205 [SF patch 560794].
4206
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004207- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4208 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4209 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004210 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4211 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4212 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004213
4214- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4215 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004216
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004217- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4218 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4219 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4220 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004221
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004222- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4223 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4224 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4225 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4226 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4227
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004228- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004229
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004230- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4231
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004232- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4233 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4234 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4235 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4236 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4237 identical to None.
4238
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004239- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4240 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4241 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4242 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4243 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4244 results now.
4245
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004246- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4247 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4248
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004249- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4250 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4251 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4252 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4253 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4254 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4255 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4256 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4257
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004258- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4259
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004260- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4261 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4262
4263- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4264 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4265 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4266 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4267 and other systems.
4268
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004269- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4270 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4271 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4272 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 +00004273 work well with these.
4274
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004275- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4276
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004277- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004278 connections.
4279
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004280- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4281 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4282 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4283
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004284- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4285 sets
4286
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004287- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4288 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4289 name.
4290
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004291- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4292 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4293 passed in.
4294
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004295- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004296 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004297 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4298 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004299
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004300- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4301
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004302- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4303
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004304- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4305 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4306 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4307
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004308- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4309 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4310 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4311 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004312 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004313
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004314- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004315 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004316 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004317
4318- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4319 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4320 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4321
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004322- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004323 the value of its expression argument.
4324
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004325- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4326 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4327 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4328
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004329- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4330 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4331 skipstone browser was included.
4332
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004333- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4334 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4335
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004336Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004338
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004339- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4340 names in addition to accepting file names.
4341
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004342- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4343 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4344 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4345 still used and useful.)
4346
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004347- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4348 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4349 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4350 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004351
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004352- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4353 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4354 the generated binary.
4355
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004356Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004357-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004358
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004359- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4360
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004361- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4362 except in the hands of experts.
4363
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004364- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004365 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4366 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4367 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004368
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004369- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4370 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4371 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4372 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4373 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4374 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4375 builds.
4376
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004377- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4378 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4379 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4380 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4381 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4382 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4383 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4384 new type.
4385
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004386- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004387
4388 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4389 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4390 positive infinities.
4391
4392 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4393 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4394 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4395 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4396 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4397 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4398 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4399
4400 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4401
4402 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4403
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004404- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4405 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4406 size of the executable.
4407
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004408- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4409 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4410 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4411 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004412
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004413- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4414
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004415- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4416 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4417 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004418
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004419- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4420 well as Unix.
4421
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004422- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4423 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4424 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4425 modules in the README file for details.
4426
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004427C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004428-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004429
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004430- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4431 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004432 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004433 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004434 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004435
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004436- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4437 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4438 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4439 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4440 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4441 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004442 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004443 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4444 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4445 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4446 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4447 aligned.)
4448
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004449- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4450 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4451 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4452
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004453- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4454 level.
4455
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004456- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4457 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4458 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4459 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4460 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4461
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004462- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4463 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4464 code.
4465
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004466- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4467 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4468 adjusting for negative indices.
4469
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004470- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4471 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4472 object.
4473
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004474- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4475 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4476 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4477
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004478- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4479 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004480
4481- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4482
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004483- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4484 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4485 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4486 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4487
4488- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4489
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004490- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004491
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004492- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004493 without going through the buffer API.
4494
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004495- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004496
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004497- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4498 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4499 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4500 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4501
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004502- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4503 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4504
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004505- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004506 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4507
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004508New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004509-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004510
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004511- OpenVMS is now supported.
4512
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004513- AtheOS is now supported.
4514
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004515- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4516
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004517- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4518
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004519Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004520-----
4521
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004522- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4523 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4524 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004525
4526Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004527-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004528
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004529- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4530 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4531 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4532 bugs.
4533 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004534 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004535 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4536 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004537 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004538
4539- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004540 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004541
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004542- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4543 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4544
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004545- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4546 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004547 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004548 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4549
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004550- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4551 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4552 use files" uninstall option).
4553
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004554- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4555
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004556- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4557 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4558
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004559- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4560 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4561 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4562
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004563- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4564 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4565 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4566 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4567 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004568 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4569 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4570 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004571
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004572- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004573 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004574 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4575 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4576 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4577 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4578 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4579 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4580 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4581 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4582 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4583 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4584 work around.
4585
4586- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4587 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4588 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4589 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4590 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4591 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4592 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4593 specified with O_CREAT too).
4594
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004595Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004596----
4597
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004598- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004599
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004600- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4601 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4602 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4603
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004604- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4605 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4606 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4607
4608- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4609 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4610 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4611 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4612 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4613 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4614 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4615 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004616
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004617- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4618 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4619 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004620
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004621- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4622 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4623 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4624 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4625 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004626
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004627- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4628 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4629 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004630
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004631- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4632 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004633
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004634- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4635 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4636 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4637 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4638 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004639
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004640- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4641 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4642 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4643
4644- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4645 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4646 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004647
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004648- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4649 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4650 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4651 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004652 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004653
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004654- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4655 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004656
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004657- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4658 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004659
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004660- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004661 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004662 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4663 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004664
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004665
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004666What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004667===============================
4668
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004669*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4670
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004671Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004672--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004673
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004674- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4675 with a custom metaclass.
4676
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004677Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004678-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004679
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004680- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4681 are proxies.
4682
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004683Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004684-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004685
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004686- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4687 very short strings.
4688
4689- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4690 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4691 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4692 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4693 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4694
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004695Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004696-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004697
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004698- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4699 close or delete time).
4700
4701- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4702 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4703
4704- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4705
4706- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004707 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004708
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004709Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004710-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004711
4712Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004713-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004714
4715C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004716-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004717
4718New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004719-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004720
4721Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004722-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004723
4724Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004725-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004726
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004727- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4728
4729- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4730 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4731
4732- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4733 deleted at process exit time.
4734
4735- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4736 in backslash.
4737
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004738Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004739----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004740
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004741- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4742 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4743 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4744
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004745
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004746What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004747===========================
4748
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004749*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4750
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004751Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004752--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004753
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004754- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4755 been extensively updated. See
4756
4757 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4758
4759 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4760
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004761- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4762 deleted!
4763
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004764- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4765 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4766 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4767 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4768 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4769
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004770- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4771
4772 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4773 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4774
4775 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4776 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4777 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4778 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4779 supported anyway.
4780
4781 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4782 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4783
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004784- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4785 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4786 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4787 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4788 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004789
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004790- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4791 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4792 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4793
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004794Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004795-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004796
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004797- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4798 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4799 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4800 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4801 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4802 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004803 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4804 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4805 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4806 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004807
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004808- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4809 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4810 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4811
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004812Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004813-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004814
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004815- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4816
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004817Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004818-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004819
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004820- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4821 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4822 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4823 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4824 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4825 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4826
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004827- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4828
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004829- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4830
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004831- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4832
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004833- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4834 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4835 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4836
4837- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4838
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004839Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004840-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004841
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004842- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4843 off a search on Google.
4844
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004845Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004846-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004847
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004848- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4849 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4850 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4851 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4852 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4853 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4854 other platforms should do likewise.
4855
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004856- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4857 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4858 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4859
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004860C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004861-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004862
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004863- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4864 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4865 producing key-value pairs.
4866
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004867- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004868 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004869 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4870 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4871 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4872 previously went unchallenged.
4873
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004874New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004875-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004876
4877Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004878-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004879
4880Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004881-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004882
4883Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004884----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004885
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004886- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4887 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004888
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004889- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4890 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4891 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4892 home.
4893
4894
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004895What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004896===========================
4897
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004898*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4899
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004900Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004901--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004902
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004903- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4904 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004905
4906 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004907 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004908
4909 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4910 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004911 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004912 This needs to be documented.
4913
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004914- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4915 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4916
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004917- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4918 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4919 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4920
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004921- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4922 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4923
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004924- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4925 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4926 class forbids it).
4927
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004928- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4929 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4930 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4931
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004932- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4933
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004934Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004935-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004936
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004937- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4938 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004939 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004940
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004941- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4942 (like 1 + '').
4943
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004944Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004945-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004946
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004947- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4948 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4949 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4950 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004951 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004952 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4953
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004954- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4955 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4956 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4957 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4958
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004959- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4960 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004961 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4962 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4963 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004964
4965- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4966 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004967
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004968- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4969 bytes on its input.
4970
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004971Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004972-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004973
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004974- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004975 convenience function.
4976
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004977- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4978 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4979 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004980 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4981 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4982 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4983 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4984 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4985 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004986
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004987- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4988 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4989 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4990 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4991
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004992- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4993 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4994 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4995
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004996- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4997 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4998 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4999 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5000
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005001- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5002 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005003 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005004 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5005 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5006 new -l and -e options.
5007
5008- statcache is now deprecated.
5009
5010- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5011 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005012 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005013 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5014 time properly taken into account.
5015
5016- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5017 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5018 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5019 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5020
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005021Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005022-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005023
5024Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005025-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005026
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005027- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5028 is built with libdb3 if available.
5029
5030- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5031
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005032C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005033-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005034
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005035- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5036 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5037 PySequence_Size().
5038
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005039- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5040
5041- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5042 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5043 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5044
5045- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5046 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5047
5048- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5049 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5050
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005051New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005052-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005053
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005054- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5055 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5056
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005057- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5058 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5059
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005060- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5061
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005062Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005063-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005064
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005065- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5066 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5067
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005068Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005069-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005070
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005071Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005072----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005073
5074- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5075 removed completely in the next release.
5076
5077- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5078 OSX.
5079
5080- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5081 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5082
5083- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5084
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005085
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005086What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005087===========================
5088
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005089*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5090
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005091Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005092--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005093
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005094- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005095 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005096 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005097 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5098 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005099 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5100 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005101 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5102 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005103
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005104- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5105 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5106
5107- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5108 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5109
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005110Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005111-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005112
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005113- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5114 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5115 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5116 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5117 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5118 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5119 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5120 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5121
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005122- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5123 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5124 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5125 example).
5126
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005127- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005128 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005129 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005130 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005131
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005132- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5133 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5134 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005135 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005136
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005137- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5138 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5139 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5140 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5141 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5142 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5143
5144 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5145
5146 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5147
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005148Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005149-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005150
5151- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5152
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005153- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5154
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005155- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5156 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005157
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005158- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5159 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5160 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5161 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5162 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5163 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005164 attributes.
5165
5166- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5167 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5168 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005169
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005170- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5171 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5172 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005173
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005174- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5175 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5176 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005177 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5178 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5179
5180- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5181 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005182
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005183Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005184-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005185
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005186- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5187 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5188
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005189- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5190 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5191 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5192 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5193
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005194- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5195 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5196 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5197 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5198
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005199 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5200 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5201 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5202 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5203 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5204 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5205 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5206 without losing information).
5207
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005208- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005209 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5210 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5211 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5212 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5213 module).
5214
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005215 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005216 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5217 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5218 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5219 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005220
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005221- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005222 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5223 encoding.
5224
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005225- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5226 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5227
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005228- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005229 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5230
5231- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5232 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5233 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5234 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5235
5236- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5237
5238- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5239 ON, and OFF.
5240
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005241- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5242 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5243
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005244Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005245-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005246
5247- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5248 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5249 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005250
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005251- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5252 been added: -X and -E.
5253
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005254Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005255-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005256
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005257- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5258 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5259
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005260C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005261-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005262
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005263- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5264 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5265 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5266 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5267 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5268
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005269- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5270 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5271 as long) arguments.
5272
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005273- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5274 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5275 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5276 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5277 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5278 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5279
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005280- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5281 input.
5282
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005283New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005284-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005285
5286Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005287-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005288
5289Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005290-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005291
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005292- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5293 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5294 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5295
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005296- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5297 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5298 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005299 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005300
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005301 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5302 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5303 import signal
5304 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005305
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005306 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005307 while 1:
5308 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005309 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005310 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5311 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5312 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5313 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005314
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005315
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005316What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5317===========================
5318
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005319*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5320
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005321Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005322--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005323
5324- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5325 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5326 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5327
5328- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5329 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5330 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5331 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5332 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5333 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5334 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005335
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005336- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005337 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005338 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5339 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5340 associate a docstring with a property.
5341
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005342- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5343 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5344 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5345 other built-in object types.
5346
5347- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5348 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5349 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5350 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5351 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5352
5353- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5354 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5355
5356- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5357 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005358 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005359 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5360 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5361 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5362 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5363 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5364
5365- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5366 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5367 class.
5368
5369- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5370 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5371 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5372 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5373
5374- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5375 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5376 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5377 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5378
5379- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5380 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5381
5382- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5383 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5384 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5385 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5386 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005387 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005388 with the same value as s.
5389
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005390- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5391
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005392Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005393----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005394
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005395- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5396
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005397- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5398 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5399 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5400 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5401 objects.
5402
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005403- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5404 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005405 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5406 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5407
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005408- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5409 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5410 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5411
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005412Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005413-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005414
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005415- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5416 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5417 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5418 by the instances.
5419
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005420- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5421 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5422 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5423
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005424- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5425 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5426 before the entire comparison is complete.
5427
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005428- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5429 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5430 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5431
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005432- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5433 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5434 getwriter().
5435
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005436- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5437 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5438
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005439- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005440 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5441 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5442
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005443- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5444 iterable object.
5445
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005446- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5447 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005448
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005449- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5450 authentication.
5451
5452- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5453 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005454
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005455- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005456 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5457 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5458 a sample driver.)
5459
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005460Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005461-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005462
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005463- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5464 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5465 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5466 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5467 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5468 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5469 kernel has large file support.
5470
5471- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5472 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5473 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5474 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5475 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5476
5477- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5478 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5479 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5480
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005481C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005482-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005483
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005484- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5485 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5486
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005487New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005488-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005489
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005490- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5491 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5492
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005493Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005494-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005495
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005496- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5497 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5498 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5499 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5500 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5501
5502- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5503 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5504 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5505 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5506
5507- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5508 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5509
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005510Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005511-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005512
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005513- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005514 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5515 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005516
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005517
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005518What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5519===========================
5520
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005521*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5522
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005523Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005524----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005525
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005526- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5527 big to represent as a C double.
5528
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005529- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5530 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5531 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5532 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5533 restriction).
5534
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005535- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5536 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5537 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5538 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5539 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5540
5541 >>> dir([])
5542 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5543 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5544 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5545 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5546 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5547 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5548 'reverse', 'sort']
5549
5550 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5551
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005552- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005553 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5554 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5555 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5556 OverflowError exception.
5557
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005558- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005559 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005560 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5561 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5562 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5563 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5564 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005565 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005566 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5567 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5568
5569 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5570 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5571 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5572 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005573
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005574- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005575 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5576 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5577 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5578 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5579 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5580 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5581 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5582 once it is created.
5583
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005584- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5585 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5586 (key, value) pairs.
5587
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005588- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005589 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5590 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5591
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005592- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5593 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5594 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5595 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5596 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005597
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005598- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005599 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5600 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5601
5602 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5603
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005604- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005605 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5606
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005607Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005608-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005609
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005610- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005611 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5612 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005613
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005614- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5615 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5616 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5617 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5618 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5619 in this area anymore).
5620
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005621- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5622 threading.Timer.
5623
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005624- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5625 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5626
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005627- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005628 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5629
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005630- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005631 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5632 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5633 converted to Python longs.
5634
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005635- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005636 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5637
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005638- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5639 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5640 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5641
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005642Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005643-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005644
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005645- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5646 division operators as per PEP 238.
5647
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005648Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005649-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005650
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005651- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5652 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5653 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5654 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5655
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005656C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005657-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005658
5659- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005660
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005661- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5662 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005663 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005664
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005665 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5666 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005667 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005668 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005669
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005670- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005671 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5672 module:
5673
5674 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005675
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005676 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5677 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005678
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005679 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5680 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005681
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005682 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5683
5684 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5685
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005686- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005687 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5688 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5689 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005690
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005691New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005692-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005693
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005694- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5695 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5696 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5697 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5698 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005699
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005700Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005701-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005702
5703Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005704-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005705
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005706- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5707 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5708 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5709 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005710 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5711 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5712 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5713 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5714 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005715
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005716- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005717 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5718
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005719
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005720What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5721===========================
5722
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005723*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5724
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005725Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005726-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005727
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005728- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5729 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5730
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005731- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5732 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5733 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005734
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005735- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5736 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5737 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5738 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005739
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005740- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5741
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005742- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005743
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005744Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005745-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005746
5747- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005748 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005749 the module docstring for details.
5750
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005751Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005752-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005753
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005754- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005755 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5756 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5757 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005758
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005759- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5760 Nick Mathewson.
5761
5762Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005763----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005764
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005765- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5766 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5767 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5768 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5769 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5770 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5771 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5772 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5773
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005774- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5775 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5776 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5777 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5778
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005779- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5780 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5781 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5782 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5783 come a long way).
5784
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005785- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5786 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5787 write filters for these warnings).
5788
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005789- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5790 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5791 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5792 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5793 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5794
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005795- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5796 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5797 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5798 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5799 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5800 older distribution.
5801
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005802Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005803-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005804
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005805- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5806 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005807 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005808
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005809- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5810 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5811 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5812
5813- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5814
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005815- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5816
5817- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5818
5819- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5820
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005821- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005822
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005823- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5824
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005825New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005826-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005827
5828C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005829-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005830
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005831- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5832 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5833 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5834 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5835 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5836 against buffer overruns.
5837
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005838- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005839 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5840 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005841 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5842 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5843 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5844
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005845- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5846 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5847 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5848 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5849 deprecated.
5850
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005851Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005852-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005853
5854- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5855 relevant is found.
5856
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005857
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005858What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005859===========================
5860
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005861*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5862
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005863Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005864----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005865
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005866- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5867 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5868 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5869 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5870 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5871 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5872 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5873 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005874 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005875 repaired.
5876
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005877- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005878 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005879 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5880 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5881 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5882 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5883 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5884 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5885 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5886 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5887
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005888- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5889 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5890 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5891 leading BMO character).
5892
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005893- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5894 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5895 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5896
5897 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5898 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5899 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005900
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005901 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5902 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5903 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5904 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5905 for various simple to use conversions.
5906
5907 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5908 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5909
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005910 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5911 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5912 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5913 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5914 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5915 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5916 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5917 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5918 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5919 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5920 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5921 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5922 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5923 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5924 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005925
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005926- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5927 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5928 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005929 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005930 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005931
5932 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005933 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5934 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5935 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5936 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5937 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005938 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5939 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005940
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005941 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5942 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5943 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005944 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005945
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005946- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5947 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5948 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5949 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5950 floating arithmetic,
5951
5952 x = 9007199254740992.0
5953 print long(x)
5954
5955 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5956 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5957 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5958 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5959 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5960 functions are of good quality).
5961
5962 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5963 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5964 algorithms to break.
5965
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005966- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5967 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5968 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5969 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5970 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5971 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5972 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5973 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5974 order.
5975
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005976- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5977 operation along the most common code paths.
5978
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005979- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5980 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5981
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005982- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5983 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5984 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5985 {}.update(UserDict())
5986
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005987- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5988 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5989 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5990 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5991 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5992 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5993 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5994 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5995
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005996- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005997 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005998
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005999 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006000 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6001 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006002 join() method of strings
6003 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006004 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6005 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006006 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006007 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006008
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006009- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6010 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6011
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006012- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6013 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6014
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006015- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6016 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6017 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6018 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6019
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006020- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6021 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006022 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006023 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6024 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006025
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006026- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6027
6028
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006029Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006030-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006031
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006032- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006033 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006034 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6035 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6036
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006037- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6038 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6039
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006040- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6041 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6042 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6043 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6044
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006045- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6046 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6047 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6048
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006049- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6050
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006051- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6052
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006053- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6054 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6055 that are still imported into string.py).
6056
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006057- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6058
6059- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6060 Now it does.
6061
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006062- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6063
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006064- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6065 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6066 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6067 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6068 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006069 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6070 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006071
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006072- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6073 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6074 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6075 'help(object)'.
6076
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006077Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006078-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006079
6080- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006081 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006082 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6083 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6084
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006085- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006086 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6087 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006088
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006089C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006090-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006091
6092- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6093 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006094
6095----
6096
6097**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**