blob: 219586fb5358cfc2fd1d1498a5e3b13e23ac60e2 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000015- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
16 reference counts in some error exit cases.
17
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000018- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
19 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
20 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
21 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
22 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
23 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
24 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
25 realloc.
26
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000027- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
28 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
29
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000030- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
31 like their int counterparts.
32
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000033- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
34 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
35 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
36 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
37 for a longer write-up of the problem).
38
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000039- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
40 serializing floats.
41
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000042- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
43 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
44 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
45
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000046- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
47 278.
48
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000049- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
50 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
51 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
52 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
53 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
54 PyNumber_*().
55 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
56
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000057- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
58 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
59 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
60 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
61
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000062- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
63 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
64 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
65 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
66 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
67
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000068- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
69 disabled caused a crash.
70
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000071- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
72 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
73
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000074- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000075 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
76
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000077- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
78
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000079- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000080 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
81 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
82 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000083
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000084- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
85
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000086- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
87 returning None.
88
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000089- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000090 ('\') with a specific error message.
91
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000092- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
93
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000094- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
95 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
96
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000097- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000098 an ferror() call.
99
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000100- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
101 list.sort().
102
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000103- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
104 (2+3) --> (5).
105
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000106- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
107
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000108- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
109 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000110
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000111- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
112 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
113 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
114
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000115Extension Modules
116-----------------
117
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000118- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000119 implemented treated all integer values except 1 as false.
120
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000121- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
122
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000123- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
124 if available on the platform.
125
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000126- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
127 available on the platform.
128
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000129- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
130 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
131
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000132- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
133
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000134- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
135 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
136 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
137
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000138- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
139
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000140- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
141 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
142
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000143- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000144 file size.
145
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000146- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
147
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000148- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
149 {remove_history,replace_history}
150
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000151- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
152 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000153
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000154- stat_float_times is now True.
155
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000156- array.array objects are now picklable.
157
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000158- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
159 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
160
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000161- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
162 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
163 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
164
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000165- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
166 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000167
168Library
169-------
170
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000171- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
172 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
173
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000174- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
175 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
176
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000177- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
178 though this can be missing in embedded interpreters
179
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000180- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
181
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000182- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
183 error messages.
184
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000185- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
186
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000187- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
188 Bug #1224621.
189
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000190- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
191 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
192 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
193 terminates by raising StopIteration.
194
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000195- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
196
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000197- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
198 component of the path.
199
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000200- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
201 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
202 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
203 class at all.
204
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000205- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
206 files to PyPI.
207
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000208- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
209 them to PyPI.
210
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000211- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
212 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
213 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
214 work as expected.
215
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000216- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
217 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
218
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000219- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000220 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
221
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000222- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
223
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000224- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
225 to build.
226
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000227- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
228 symbolic links on Windows.
229
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000230- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000231 profile.py if available.
232
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000233- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
234
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000235- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
236 in LWPCookieJar.
237
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000238- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
239
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000240- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
241
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000242- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
243
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000244- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
245
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000246- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
247
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000248- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
249
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000250- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
251
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000252- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
253
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000254- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
255 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
256 be exploited in various ways.
257
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000258- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
259
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000260- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
261
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000262- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
263
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000264- Enhancements to the csv module:
265
266 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
267 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000268 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000269 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
270 reporting.
271 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
272 dictates.
273 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000274 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000275 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000276 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
277 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000278 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
279 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000280 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000281 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
282 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
283 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
284 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
285 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
286 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
287 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
288 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
289 without first creating a dialect class.
290 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
291 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
292 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000293 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000294 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
295 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000296 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
297 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
298 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
299 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000300 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
301 This has been fixed.
302
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000303- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
304 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
305 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
306 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
307
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000308- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
309
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000310- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
311 (Bug #951915).
312
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000313- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
314 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
315 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
316 encoding alias table
317
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000318- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
319
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000320- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
321 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
322
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000323- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
324
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000325- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
326
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000327- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
328
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000329- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
330
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000331- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
332
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000333- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
334 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
335 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
336
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000337- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000338 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000339
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000340- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
341 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
342 tokenizer with very long source lines.
343
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000344- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
345 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
346
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000347- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
348 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000349
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000350- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
351 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
352
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000353- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
354 correctly.
355
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000356- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
357 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
358 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
359 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
360 between two lines.
361
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000362
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000363Build
364-----
365
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000366- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
367 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
368 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000369 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000370
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000371- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
372 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
373 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
374
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000375- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
376
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000377- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
378 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
379
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000380- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
381 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
382 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
383 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
384 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
385 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
386 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
387 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
388
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000389- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
390 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
391 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
392 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
393
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000394
395C API
396-----
397
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000398- Removed PyRange_New().
399
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000400
401Tests
402-----
403
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000404- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000405
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000406
407Documentation
408-------------
409
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000410- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
411
412- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
413
414- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
415
416- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
417
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000418- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
419 Closes bug #1166582.
420
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000421- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
422 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
423 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
424
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000425Mac
426---
427
428
429
430Tools/Demos
431-----------
432
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000433- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
434
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000435- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000436
437
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000438What's New in Python 2.4 final?
439===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000440
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000441*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000442
443Core and builtins
444-----------------
445
446- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
447 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
448 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
449
450
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000451What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
452==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000453
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000454*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000455
456Core and builtins
457-----------------
458
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000459- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
460 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
461 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
462
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000463
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000464Library
465-------
466
467- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
468 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
469 raised is re-raised.
470
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000471- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
472 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
473
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000474- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
475 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
476 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
477 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
478 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
479 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
480 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
481 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
482 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
483 by the slice are recomputed now.
484
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000485- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000486
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000487Build
488-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000489
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000490- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
491 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
492 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000493
494C API
495-----
496
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000497- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
498
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000499
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000500What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
501================================
502
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000503*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000504
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000505License
506-------
507
508The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
509is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
510changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
511Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
512intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
513durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
514the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
515License::
516
517 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
518
519says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
520to Python 2.1.1.
521
522The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
523License Version 2.
524
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000525Core and builtins
526-----------------
527
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000528- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
529 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
530 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
531 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
532 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
533 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
534 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
535 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
536 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
537 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
538
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000539- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000540
541Extension Modules
542-----------------
543
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000544- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
545 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
546 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
547 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000548
549Library
550-------
551
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000552- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
553 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
554 returned.
555
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000556- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
557
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000558- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
559 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
560
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000561- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
562
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000563- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
564 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000565
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000566- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
567
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000568- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
569
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000570- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000571 the source code is updated and reloaded.
572
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000573Build
574-----
575
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000576- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000577
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000578What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
579================================
580
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000581*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000582
583Core and builtins
584-----------------
585
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000586- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000587 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
588
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000589- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
590 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
591 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
592 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
593
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000594- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
595 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
596
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000597- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
598 constant.
599
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000600- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
601 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
602 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
603 large), and to anomalies such as
604 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
605 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
606 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
607 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000608
609Extension modules
610-----------------
611
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000612- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
613 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000614 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
615 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
616 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000617
618Library
619-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000620
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000621- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000622 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000623 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
624 --swig-cpp.
625
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000626- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
627 it is set.
628
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000629- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000630
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000631- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
632 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
633 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
634 Closes bug #1039270.
635
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000636- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000637
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000638 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000639 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
640 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
641 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
642 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
643 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
644 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
645 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
646 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
647 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
648 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
649 + Updates to documentation.
650
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000651- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
652 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
653 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
654 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
655
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000656- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000657
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000658- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
659 applications should use the getmember function.
660
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000661- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
662
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000663- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
664 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
665 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
666 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
667 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
668 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
669 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
670 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
671 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
672
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000673- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
674 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000675 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000676
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000677- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
678 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
679 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
680 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
681 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
682 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
683 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
684 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000685
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000686- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
687 the new public features (of which there are many).
688
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000689- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000690 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
691 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
692 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
693 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000694 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000695
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000696- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
697
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000698- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
699 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
700 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
701 options.
702
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000703- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
704 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
705 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
706 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
707 conditions under which non-string values work.
708
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000709Build
710-----
711
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000712- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
713 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
714 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
715
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000716- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
717 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
718 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
719 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
720 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000721
722C API
723-----
724
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000725- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
726 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
727
728- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
729
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000730- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
731 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
732 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
733 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
734 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
735 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
736 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
737 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
738 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
739
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000740- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
741
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000742- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
743 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
744 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000745
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000746Tests
747-----
748
749- test__locale ported to unittest
750
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000751Mac
752---
753
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000754- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
755 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
756 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000757
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000758Tools/Demos
759-----------
760
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000761- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
762 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
763 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
764 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
765 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000766
767
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000768What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
769=================================
770
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000771*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000772
773Core and builtins
774-----------------
775
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000776- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000777 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
778
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000779- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
780 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
781 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
782 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
783 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
784 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
785 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
786 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000787 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
788 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
789 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
790 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
791 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000792
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000793- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
794 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
795 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
796 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
797 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
798
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000799- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
800
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000801- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
802 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
803
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000804- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
805 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
806 modified the list.
807
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000808- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
809 functions is now writable.
810
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000811- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
812 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
813 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
814 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
815
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000816- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
817 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
818 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
819 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
820 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000821
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000822- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
823 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
824
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000825Extension modules
826-----------------
827
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000828- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
829
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000830- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
831 data.
832
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000833- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
834 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
835 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
836 supposed to have been truncated away.
837
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000838- Added socket.socketpair().
839
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000840- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
841 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
842
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000843- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000844 versions of Python, have now been removed.
845
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000846Library
847-------
848
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000849- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000850 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000851
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000852- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
853 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
854
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000855- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
856 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
857
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000858- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
859
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000860- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
861 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000862
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000863- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
864 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
865
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000866- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
867
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000868- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
869
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000870- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
871
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000872- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
873 Percivall.
874
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000875- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
876 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
877
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000878- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
879 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
880 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000881 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000882
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000883- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
884 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
885 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
886 and exponent.
887
888- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
889
890- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
891 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
892 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
893
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000894- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
895 to the readline module.
896
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000897- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000898 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
899 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000900
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000901- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
902 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
903 contains symlinks.
904
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000905- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
906 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
907
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000908- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
909 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
910 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
911
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000912- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
913 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
914 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
915 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
916 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
917 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
918 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
919 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
920 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
921 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
922 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
923 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
924 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
925
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000926- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
927
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000928Tools/Demos
929-----------
930
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000931- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
932 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
933
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000934- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
935
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000936Build
937-----
938
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000939- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
940 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
941 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
942 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
943 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
944 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
945 plans to do so.
946
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000947- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
948 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
949
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000950- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
951 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
952
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000953- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
954 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
955
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000956- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
957 GNU/k*BSD systems.
958
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000959- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
960 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
961
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000962C API
963-----
964
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000965..
966
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000967Documentation
968-------------
969
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000970- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
971 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
972
973- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
974 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
975 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000976
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000977New platforms
978-------------
979
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000980- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
981
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000982Tests
983-----
984
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000985..
986
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000987Windows
988-------
989
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000990- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
991 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
992 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
993 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
994 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
995 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
996 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
997 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
998 the problem.
999
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001000Mac
1001---
1002
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001003..
1004
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001005
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001006What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1007=================================
1008
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001009*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001010
1011Core and builtins
1012-----------------
1013
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001014- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1015 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1016 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1017 sensitive code.
1018
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001019- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001020 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001021
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001022 @staticmethod
1023 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001024
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001025 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001026
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001027- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1028 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1029 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1030 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1031 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1032 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1033 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1034 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1035 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1036 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1037 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1038
1039 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1040 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1041 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1042 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1043 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1044 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1045 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1046
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001047- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1048 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1049
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001050- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001051 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001052
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001053- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001054 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001055 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1056
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001057- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001058 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1059 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1060
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001061- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1062 types that support garbage collection.
1063
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001064- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1065
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001066- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1067 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1068 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1069 Jython.
1070
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001071- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1072
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001073- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1074 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1075
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001076- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1077 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1078 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001079
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001080- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1081 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1082 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1083
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001084Extension modules
1085-----------------
1086
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001087- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1088
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001089Library
1090-------
1091
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001092- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1093 TIS-620
1094
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001095- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1096 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1097 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1098 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1099 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1100 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1101 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1102 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1103 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1104 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1105
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001106- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1107
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001108- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1109 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1110 same as when the argument is omitted).
1111 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1112
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001113- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1114
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001115- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1116 schemes are offered.
1117
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001118- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1119
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001120- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1121 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1122 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1123
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001124- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1125
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001126- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1127 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1128
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001129- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1130 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1131 when dummy_threading is being used.
1132
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001133- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1134 from a tarfile.
1135
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001136- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001137 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001138
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001139- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1140 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1141 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1142 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1143
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001144- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1145 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1146
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001147- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1148 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1149 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1150 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1151 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1152 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1153 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1154 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1155 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1156 by some other method in progress).
1157
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001158- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1159 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1160 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001161
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001162- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1163
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001164- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1165 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1166 AM Kuchling.
1167
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001168- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1169 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1170 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1171
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001172- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1173 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1174 instead of unsigned.
1175
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001176- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001177 no longer part of the public API.
1178
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001179- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1180 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1181 string methods of the same name).
1182
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001183- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001184 SF patch 945642.
1185
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001186- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1187
1188 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1189
1190 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1191 DocTestSuites.
1192
1193- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1194 that provide thread-local data.
1195
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001196- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1197 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1198
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001199- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1200
1201- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1202 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1203 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1204
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001205- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1206
1207 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1208 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1209 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001210
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001211 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1212 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1213 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1214 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1215
1216 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1217 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1218
1219 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1220 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1221 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1222 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1223
1224 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1225 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1226 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1227 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1228 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1229
1230 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1231 wrapping help output.
1232
1233 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1234 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1235 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001236
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001237C API
1238-----
1239
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001240- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1241 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1242 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1243 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1244 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1245 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1246 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1247 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1248 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1249 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1250 its visible semantics have not changed.
1251
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001252- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1253 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1254
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001255Documentation
1256-------------
1257
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001258- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001259
1260 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001261 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001262
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001263 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001264
1265 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1266
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001267- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001268
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001269Tests
1270-----
1271
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001272- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001273 platforms that use the Makefile.
1274
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001275- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1276 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1277 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1278
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001279
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001280What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1281=================================
1282
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001283*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001284
1285Core and builtins
1286-----------------
1287
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001288- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1289 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1290 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1291 objects now (one object instead of three).
1292
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001293- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1294 Windows DLLs.
1295
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001296- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1297 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001298
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001299- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1300 a new .pyc magic.
1301
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001302- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1303 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1304 be there.
1305
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001306- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1307 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1308 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1309
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001310- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1311 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1312 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1313
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001314- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1315
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001316- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1317 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1318 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001319
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001320- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1321 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1322
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001323- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1324
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001325- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001326 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001327
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001328- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1329
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001330- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1331
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001332- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1333 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1334
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001335- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1336 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1337 Fixes bug #858016 .
1338
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001339- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1340 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1341 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1342
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001343- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1344 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1345 improves their performance (about 35%).
1346
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001347- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1348 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1349 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1350
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001351- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1352 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1353 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1354 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1355
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001356- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1357 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001358 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001359 length is not known).
1360
1361- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1362 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001363 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1364 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001365 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1366
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001367- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1368 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1369
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001370- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1371 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1372 keyword arguments.
1373
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001374- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1375 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1376 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1377
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001378- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1379 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1380 cases.
1381
1382- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1383 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1384 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1385 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1386 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1387 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1388 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1389 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1390 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1391 a release build.
1392
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001393- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1394 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1395
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001396- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001397 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001398
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001399- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1400 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1401 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1402 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1403 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1404 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1405 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1406 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1407 destroyed.
1408
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001409- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1410 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1411 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1412 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1413 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1414 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1415 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1416 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1417
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001418- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1419 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1420 character other than a space.
1421
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001422- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1423 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1424 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1425 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1426 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1427 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1428 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1429 attributes with the same name.
1430
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001431- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1432 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1433 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1434 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1435 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1436 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1437 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1438 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1439 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1440 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1441 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1442 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1443 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1444 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001445
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001446- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1447 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1448 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1449 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1450 This has been repaired.
1451
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001452- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1453
1454- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1455
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001456- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1457 over a sequence.
1458
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001459- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001460 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001461
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001462- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1463
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001464- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1465 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1466 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1467 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1468 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1469 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1470 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1471 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1472
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001473- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1474 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1475 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1476
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001477- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1478 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1479 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1480 freelist.
1481
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001482- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1483 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1484
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001485- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1486 number.
1487
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001488- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1489 a TypeError exception.
1490
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001491- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1492 820195.
1493
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001494- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1495 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1496 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1497
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001498- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001499 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1500 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001501
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001502- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1503 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1504 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1505
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001506- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1507 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001508 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001509
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001510- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001511 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1512 the first call.
1513
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001514
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001515Extension modules
1516-----------------
1517
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001518- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1519 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1520
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001521- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1522 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1523 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1524 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1525 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1526 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1527 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001528
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001529- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1530
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001531- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1532
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001533- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1534 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1535
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001536- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1537 fewer false positives.
1538
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001539- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1540 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1541
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001542- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001543 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1544
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001545- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001546 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001547 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001548 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1549 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001550
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001551- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1552 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1553 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1554 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1555
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001556- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1557 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1558 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1559 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1560 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1561 #897625.
1562
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001563- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1564 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1565
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001566- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1567 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1568 and pops on either side of the deque.
1569
1570- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1571 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1572
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001573- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1574 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1575 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1576 other functions that expect a function argument.
1577
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001578- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1579
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001580- os.getsid was added.
1581
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001582- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1583 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1584 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1585
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001586- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1587
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001588- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1589
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001590- readline.clear_history was added.
1591
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001592- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1593
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001594- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1595
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001596- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1597
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001598- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1599
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001600- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1601
1602- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1603
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001604- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1605
1606- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1607
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001608- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1609 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1610 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1611
1612- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1613 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1614 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1615 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1616 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1617 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1618 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1619
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001620- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1621 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1622 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1623 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001624
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001625- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001626 iterators from a single iterable.
1627
1628- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1629 of raising a TypeError exception.
1630
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001631- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1632 as parameter.
1633
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001634Library
1635-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001636
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001637- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1638 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1639 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001640
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001641- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1642 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1643 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001644
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001645- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001646
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001647- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1648 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001649
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001650- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1651 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1652
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001653- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1654
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001655- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001656 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001657
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001658- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001659 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001660
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001661- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1662
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001663- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1664 on cygwin and mingw32.
1665
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001666- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1667
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001668- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1669 module.
1670
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001671- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1672 installation scheme for all platforms.
1673
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001674- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001675 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001676
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001677- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1678 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1679 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1680
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001681- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1682 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1683 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1684
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001685- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1686
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001687- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1688
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001689- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1690 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1691
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001692- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1693 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1694 type pattern with the same value exists.
1695
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001696- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1697 when run from the command prompt).
1698
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001699- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1700 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1701
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001702- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1703 default sort).
1704
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001705- Added global runctx function to profile module
1706
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001707- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1708
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001709- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1710
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001711- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1712
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001713- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001714 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1715 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1716 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1717 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1718 accordingly.
1719
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001720- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1721 decoding standards.
1722
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001723- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1724 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1725 called for all requests.
1726
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001727- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1728 they are passed to the compiler.
1729
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001730- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1731 indent, width and depth.
1732
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001733- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1734 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1735
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001736- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1737 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1738
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001739- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1740
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001741- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1742
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001743- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1744
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001745- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1746 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1747
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001748- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001749 for better performance.
1750
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001751- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001752
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001753- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1754 a string).
1755
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001756- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1757
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001758- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1759
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001760- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1761
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001762- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1763
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001764- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1765 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1766 list of fieldnames.
1767
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001768- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1769 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1770
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001771- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1772
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001773- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1774 empty lists.
1775
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001776- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1777 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1778 and shelves.
1779
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001780- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1781 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1782
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001783- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001784 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1785 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001786
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001787- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1788 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001789 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001790
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001791- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001792 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1793 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1794
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001795- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1796 and removed in Py2.4.
1797
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001798- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1799
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001800- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1801
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001802Tools/Demos
1803-----------
1804
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001805- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1806 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1807
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001808- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1809
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001810- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1811 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1812 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1813 destination in situations where both files are given.
1814
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001815- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1816 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1817 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1818 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1819
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001820- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1821
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001822- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1823 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1824 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1825 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1826 now.
1827
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001828- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1829 in effect
1830
1831- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1832 C-c C-h
1833
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001834- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1835 -d option was given.
1836
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001837Build
1838-----
1839
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001840- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1841 build under OS X.
1842
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001843- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1844 --enable-profiling.
1845
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001846- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1847 is configured --with-tsc.
1848
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001849- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1850 on AMD64.
1851
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001852- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1853 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1854
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001855- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1856 removed.
1857
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001858- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1859 supported (see PEP 11).
1860
1861- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1862
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001863- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1864
1865- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1866 (see PEP 11).
1867
1868- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1869 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1870
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001871C API
1872-----
1873
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001874- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1875 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1876 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1877
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001878- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1879 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1880 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1881 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1882
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001883- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1884 generator objects.
1885
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001886- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1887 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001888 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1889 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001890
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001891- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1892 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1893
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001894- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1895 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1896 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1897 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1898 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1899
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001900- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1901 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1902 about 10% faster.
1903
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001904- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1905 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1906
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001907- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1908 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1909 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1910 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1911
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001912Windows
1913-------
1914
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001915- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1916 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1917 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1918 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1919
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001920- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1921 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1922 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1923
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001924
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001925What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1926===============================
1927
1928*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1929
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001930IDLE
1931----
1932
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001933- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1934 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1935 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1936 context-menu actions.
1937
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001938- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1939 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1940 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1941 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1942 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1943 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1944 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1945 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1946 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1947
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001948
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001949What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1950=============================================
1951
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001952*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001953
1954Core and builtins
1955-----------------
1956
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001957- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001958 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001959 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1960
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001961Extension modules
1962-----------------
1963
1964- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1965 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1966 than once. This has been fixed.
1967
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001968- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1969 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1970 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1971 call.
1972
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001973- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1974
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001975Library
1976-------
1977
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001978- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1979 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1980
1981- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1982 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1983 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1984 restored.
1985
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001986IDLE
1987----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001988
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001989- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001990
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001991Build
1992-----
1993
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001994- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1995 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1996
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001997C API
1998-----
1999
2000Windows
2001-------
2002
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002003- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2004 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2005
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002006- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2007
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002008Mac
2009---
2010
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002011- Various fixes to pimp.
2012
2013- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2014
2015- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2016 more problems than it solves.
2017
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002018
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002019What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2020=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002021
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002022*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2023
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002024Core and builtins
2025-----------------
2026
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002027- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2028 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2029
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002030- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2031 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002032 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002033
2034- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2035 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2036 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002037 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002038
2039- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2040 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002041
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002042- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2043 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2044 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2045
2046- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002047 770247.
2048
2049- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002050
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002051Extension modules
2052-----------------
2053
2054- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2055 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2056
2057- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2058
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002059- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2060
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002061- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2062 contained within the _strptime module.
2063
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002064- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2065 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2066
2067- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002068 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2069
2070- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2071 the find_class attribute, if present.
2072
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002073- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002074
2075 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2076 (SF bug 763298).
2077
2078 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002079 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2080 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2081 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002082
2083 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2084
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002085Library
2086-------
2087
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002088- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2089
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002090- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2091 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2092 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2093 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2094 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2095 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2096 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2097 or Tester().
2098
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002099- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2100 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2101 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2102 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2103 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2104 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2105 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2106 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2107 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002108
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002109 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002110
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002111- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2112 weren't before was an oversight.
2113
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002114- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2115 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2116
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002117- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2118 when there are no lines.
2119
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002120- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2121 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2122
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002123- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2124 to child processes.
2125
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002126- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2127
2128- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2129
2130- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2131 xmlrpclib.
2132
2133- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2134 responses.
2135
2136- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2137 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2138
2139- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2140 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2141 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2142
2143- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2144 used as patterns.
2145
2146- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2147 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2148 than Tk 8.3.
2149
2150- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2151
2152- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002153
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002154Tools/Demos
2155-----------
2156
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002157- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2158
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002159- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2160
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002161- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002162
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002163Build
2164-----
2165
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002166- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2167
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002168- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2169
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002170- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2171 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002172
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002173- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2174 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2175 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002176
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002177C API
2178-----
2179
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002180- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2181 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2182
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002183Windows
2184-------
2185
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002186- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2187 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2188 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2189 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2190 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2191 Python exception ::
2192
2193 thread.error: can't start new thread
2194
2195 is raised now.
2196
2197- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2198 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2199 instead of from DLL teardown.
2200
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002201Mac
2202---
2203
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002204- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002205 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002206 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2207 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2208 the executable in the bundle.
2209
2210- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002211
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002212- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2213
2214- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2215 on Panther.
2216
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002217What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2218================================
2219
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002220*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002221
2222Core and builtins
2223-----------------
2224
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002225- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2226 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2227 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2228 with the -i option.
2229
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002230- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2231 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2232
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002233- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2234 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2235
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002236- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2237 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2238 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2239 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2240 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2241 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2242 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2243 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2244 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2245 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2246 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2247 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2248 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002249
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002250- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2251 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2252 embedded in a lambda expression.
2253
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002254- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2255 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2256 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2257 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2258 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2259
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002260- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2261 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2262 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2263
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002264- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2265 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2266
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002267- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2268 It's writable again.
2269
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002270- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2271 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2272 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002273 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002274
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002275- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2276 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2277 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2278
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002279Extension modules
2280-----------------
2281
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002282- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2283 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2284
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002285- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2286 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2287 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2288 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2289
2290- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2291 collection.
2292
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002293- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2294 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2295 unique within a single program run.
2296
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002297- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2298 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2299
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002300- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2301 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2302
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002303- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2304 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002305
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002306- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2307
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002308- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2309 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2310
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002311- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2312 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2313 for many BSD-derived systems.
2314
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002315
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002316Library
2317-------
2318
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002319- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2320 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2321 primary ones:
2322
2323 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2324 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2325 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2326
2327 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2328 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2329 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2330 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2331 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2332 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2333
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002334- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2335 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2336 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2337 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2338 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2339 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2340 argument.
2341
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002342- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2343 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2344 in the archive.
2345
2346- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2347 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2348
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002349- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2350 569574).
2351
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002352- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2353 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2354 no more.
2355
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002356- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2357 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2358 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2359 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2360 code coverage.
2361
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002362- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2363 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2364 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002365 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2366 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002367
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002368- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2369 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2370 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002371 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002372
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002373- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2374
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002375- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2376 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2377 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2378 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2379
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002380- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2381 handling.
2382
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002383- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2384 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2385
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002386- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2387 in socket.py.
2388
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002389- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2390
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002391- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2392 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2393 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2394 opener with proxy support.
2395
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002396- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2397
2398- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2399
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002400Tools/Demos
2401-----------
2402
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002403- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2404
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002405- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2406
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002407- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2408 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002409
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002410- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2411 files.
2412
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002413Build
2414-----
2415
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002416- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002417 different root directory.
2418
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002419C API
2420-----
2421
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002422- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2423 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2424 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2425 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2426 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2427 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2428 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2429 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2430 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2431 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2432
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002433- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2434 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2435 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2436 from Python.
2437
2438
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002439New platforms
2440-------------
2441
2442None this time.
2443
2444Tests
2445-----
2446
2447- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2448 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2449
2450Windows
2451-------
2452
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002453- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2454
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002455- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2456 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2457 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2458 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2459 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2460 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2461 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2462 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2463 that's what it's for.
2464
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002465Mac
2466---
2467
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002468- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2469 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2470 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2471 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002472- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2473 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2474- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002475
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002476SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2477------------------------------------
2478
2479430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2480598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2481622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2482661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2483683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2484697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2485713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2486724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2487727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2488729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2489730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2490731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2491732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2492733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2493735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2494740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2495744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2496745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2497747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2498749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2499751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2500753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2501755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2502757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2503760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2504
2505
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002506What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2507================================
2508
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002509*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002510
2511Core and builtins
2512-----------------
2513
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002514- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2515 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2516
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002517- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2518 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2519 and cannot be strings).
2520
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002521- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2522 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2523 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2524 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2525
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002526- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2527 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2528 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2529 Python itself.
2530
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002531- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2532 the referenced object, if it has one.
2533
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002534- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2535 the thread started at
2536 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2537
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002538- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2539 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2540 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2541 placed on a list index.
2542
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002543- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2544 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2545 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2546 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2547
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002548- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2549 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2550 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2551 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2552 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2553 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2554 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2555
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002556- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2557 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2558 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2559 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2560 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2561
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002562- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2563 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002564
2565- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2566 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2567 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2568 #693195.)
2569
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002570- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2571 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002572
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002573- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002574 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002575 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2576 interpreter executions, would fail.
2577
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002578- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002579 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002580 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002581
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002582Extension modules
2583-----------------
2584
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002585- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2586 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2587 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2588 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2589
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002590- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2591 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2592
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002593- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2594 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2595 and Greg Chapman.)
2596
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002597- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2598 recursively.
2599
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002600- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002601 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2602 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2603 leaks.
2604
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002605- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2606
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002607- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2608 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2609 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2610 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2611 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2612 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2613 #705836.
2614
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002615- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002616 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2617
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002618- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2619 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2620 See SF bug #692416.
2621
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002622- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2623 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2624
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002625- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2626 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2627 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002628
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002629- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002630 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2631 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2632
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002633- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2634 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2635 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2636 timeouts to work properly.
2637
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002638Library
2639-------
2640
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002641- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2642 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2643 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2644 future release.
2645
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002646- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2647 for querying platform dependent features.
2648
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002649- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002650
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002651- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2652 pickle protocol versions.
2653
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002654- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2655 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2656 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2657
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002658- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2659
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002660- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2661 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2662 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2663 modules.
2664
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002665- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2666 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2667 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2668
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002669- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2670 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2671
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002672- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2673 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2674 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2675
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002676- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002677 MS Office extensions.
2678
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002679- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2680 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2681
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002682- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2683 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2684
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002685- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2686 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2687 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2688 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2689 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2690 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2691
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002692- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2693 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2694 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002695
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002696- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2697 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2698 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2699
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002700- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2701
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002702- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2703 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2704 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2705
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002706Tools/Demos
2707-----------
2708
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002709- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2710 See the module docstring for details.
2711
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002712Build
2713-----
2714
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002715- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2716 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002717
2718C API
2719-----
2720
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002721- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2722
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002723- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2724 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2725 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2726
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002727- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2728 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002729
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002730 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2731 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2732 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002733
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002734- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002735 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2736
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002737- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2738 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2739 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002740
2741New platforms
2742-------------
2743
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002744None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002745
2746Tests
2747-----
2748
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002749- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2750 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002751
2752Windows
2753-------
2754
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002755- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2756 function.
2757
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002758- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2759 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002760
2761Mac
2762---
2763
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002764- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2765 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002766
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002767- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2768 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002769
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002770- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2771 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2772 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002773
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002774- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002775 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2776 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002777
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002778- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2779 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002780
2781
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002782What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2783=================================
2784
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002785*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002786
2787Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002788-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002789
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002790- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2791 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2792 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2793
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002794- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2795 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2796 (SF patch #664376.)
2797
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002798- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2799 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2800 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2801 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2802 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2803 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002804 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002805
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002806- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2807 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2808 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2809 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002810 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002811
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002812- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2813 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2814 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2815 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2816 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2817 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2818 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2819 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2820 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2821 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2822 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2823
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002824- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2825 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2826 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2827 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2828 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2829 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2830
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002831- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2832 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2833
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002834- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2835 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2836 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2837 case.)
2838
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002839- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2840 passed as unicode strings.
2841
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002842- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2843 See SF bug #683467.
2844
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002845- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2846 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2847
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002848- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2849
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002850- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2851
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002852- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2853 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2854 arguments.
2855
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002856- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2857 See SF bug #667147.
2858
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002859- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002860 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002861 See SF bug #676155.
2862
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002863- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002864 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002865 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2866 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2867 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2868 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2869 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2870 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002871
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002872Extension modules
2873-----------------
2874
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002875- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2876 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2877 tp_as_number pointer.
2878
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002879- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2880 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2881 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2882 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2883 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2884
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002885- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2886
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002887- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2888
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002889- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002890 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002891 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2892 patch #678531.)
2893
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002894- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2895 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2896
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002897- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2898 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2899
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002900- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2901
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002902- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2903 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2904 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2905
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002906- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2907
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002908- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2909 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2910
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002911- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002912
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002913- datetime changes:
2914
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002915 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2916
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002917 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2918 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2919 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2920 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2921 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2922 now.
2923
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002924 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002925 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2926 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002927
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002928 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002929 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002930 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2931 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2932 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2933 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002934
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002935 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2936 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2937 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002938 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2939
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002940 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2941 by a later example coded by Guido.
2942
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002943 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002944 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2945 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2946 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002947 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2948 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2949
2950 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2951 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2952 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2953 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2954 tzinfo subclass instance.
2955
2956 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2957 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2958 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2959 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2960 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2961 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2962 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2963 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002964
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002965 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2966 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2967 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2968 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2969 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002970 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2971
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002972 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002973
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002974 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2975 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2976 as a naive datetime object.
2977
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002978 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2979 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2980 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2981
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002982 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2983 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2984 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2985 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2986 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2987 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2988 comparison.
2989
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002990 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2991 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2992 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2993 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002994 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002995
2996 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002997
2998 and ::
2999
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003000 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3001
3002 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3003 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3004 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3005 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3006
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003007 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3008 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3009 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3010 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3011 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3012
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003013 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3014 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003015 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3016 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003017
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003018Library
3019-------
3020
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003021- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3022 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3023
3024- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3025 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3026 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3027 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3028 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3029 See PEP 307 for details.
3030
3031- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3032 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3033
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003034- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3035 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003036 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003037 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3038 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003039 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003040
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003041- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3042 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3043
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003044- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3045 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3046 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3047
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003048- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3049
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003050- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3051 exception.
3052
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003053- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3054 class.
3055
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003056- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3057 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3058 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3059
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003060- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3061 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3062
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003063- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003064 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3065 See SF bug #659228.
3066
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003067- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3068 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3069 See SF patch #651082.
3070
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003071- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003072
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003073- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3074 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3075
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003076- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003077 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003078
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003079- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3080 DOS paths from other platforms.
3081
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003082Tools/Demos
3083-----------
3084
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003085- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3086 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3087 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3088 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3089 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3090 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3091 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3092 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3093 example:
3094
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003095 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3096 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003097
3098 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3099
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003100
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003101Build
3102-----
3103
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003104- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3105 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3106 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003107 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3108
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003109 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3110
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003111- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3112 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3113 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3114 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3115 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3116 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3117 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3118 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3119 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3120
3121- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3122 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3123 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3124 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3125
3126- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3127 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3128
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003129C API
3130-----
3131
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003132- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3133 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003134
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003135- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3136 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3137 tp_as_number pointer.
3138
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003139- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3140 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3141 (SF #681367)
3142
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003143- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3144 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3145 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3146 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003147
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003148Tests
3149-----
3150
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003151- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003152 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3153 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3154 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3155 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3156 pydoc.)
3157
3158- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3159
3160- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003161
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003162Windows
3163-------
3164
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003165- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3166 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3167 time).
3168
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003169- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3170 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3171
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003172- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3173 release without strong cryptography.
3174
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003175- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003176 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003177
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003178- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3179 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3180
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003181Mac
3182---
3183
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003184- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3185 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003186
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003187- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3188 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3189 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003190
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003191- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3192 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003193
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003194- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3195 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3196 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3197 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003198
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003199- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003200 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3201 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3202 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003203
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003204
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003205What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003206=================================
3207
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003208*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003209
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003210Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003211--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003212
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003213- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3214
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003215- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3216 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003217 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003218 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003219 a different meaning than before.
3220
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003221- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003222 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003223 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003224
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003225- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003226 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003227 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003228
3229- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3230 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3231 and deallocation.
3232
3233- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3234 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3235
3236- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3237 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3238 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3239 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3240 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3241
3242- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3243 now detected by the garbage collector.
3244
3245- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3246 [SF bug 519621]
3247
3248- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3249 identifier.
3250
3251- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3252 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3253 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3254 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3255 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3256 [SF bug 563060]
3257
3258- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3259 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3260 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3261 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3262 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3263
3264- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3265 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3266 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3267
3268- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3269
3270- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3271 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3272 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3273 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3274 state of the slots would be lost.)
3275
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003276Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003277-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003278
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003279- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003280 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3281 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3282 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3283 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003284 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3285 Jython 2.1.
3286
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003287- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003288 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003289 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3290 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3291 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3292 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3293 these, see PEP 302.
3294
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003295- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3296 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3297 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3298
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003299- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3300 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3301 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3302
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003303- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3304 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3305 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3306
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003307- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3308 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3309 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3310 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3311 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3312 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3313 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3314 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3315 releases or implementations.
3316
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003317- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003318 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3319 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003320
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003321- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3322 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3323
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003324- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3325 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3326 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3327
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003328- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3329 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3330
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003331- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3332 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003333 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3334 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003335
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003336- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3337 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3338 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3339 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3340 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3341
3342 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3343 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3344 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3345 pattern.
3346
3347 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3348 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3349 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3350 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3351
3352 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3353 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3354 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3355 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3356 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3357 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3358
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003359- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3360 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3361 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3362 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3363 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3364 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3365 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3366 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003367
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003368- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3369 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3370 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3371 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3372 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003373 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3374 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3375 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3376 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3377 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3378 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3379 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003380
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003381- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3382 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3383
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003384- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3385 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3386 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3387 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3388 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3389 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3390 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3391 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3392 to Zack Weinberg!
3393
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003394- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3395 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3396 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3397 type. This has been fixed now.
3398
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003399- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3400 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3401 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3402
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003403- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3404 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3405 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3406 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3407 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3408 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3409 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3410 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003411 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003412
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003413- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3414 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3415 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003416
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003417- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3418 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3419 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3420 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3421 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3422 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3423 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3424 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003425 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003426 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3427 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3428
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003429- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3430 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3431 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3432 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3433 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3434 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3435 this.)
3436
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003437- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3438 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003439 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003440 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003441 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3442 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003443 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3444 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003445
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003446- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3447 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3448 currently running.
3449
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003450- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3451 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3452 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3453 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3454
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003455- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3456 as directory names.
3457
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003458- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3459 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3460
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003461- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3462 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3463
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003464- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003465 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3466 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003467
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003468- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3469 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3470 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3471 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3472 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3473
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003474- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3475 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3476 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3477 removed.
3478
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003479- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3480 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3481 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3482
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003483- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3484 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3485 to __debug__.
3486
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003487- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3488 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3489 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3490
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003491- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3492 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3493 deprecated now.
3494
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003495- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3496 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3497 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003498
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003499- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3500 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3501 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3502 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3503 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003504
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003505- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3506 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3507
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003508- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3509 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3510 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003511 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003512 is backward compatible.
3513
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003514- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3515 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3516 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3517 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3518 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3519
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003520- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3521 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3522 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3523 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3524 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3525 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003526
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003527- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3528 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3529
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003530- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3531 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3532
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003533- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3534 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3535 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3536 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3537 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3538
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003539- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3540 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3541 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3542
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003543- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003544 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3545
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003546- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3547 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3548 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003549
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003550- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3551 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3552
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003553- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3554 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3555 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3556
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003557- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3558
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003559Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003560-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003561
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003562- Added three operators to the operator module:
3563 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3564 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3565 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3566
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003567- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3568
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003569- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3570 archives.
3571
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003572- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3573 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3574 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3575
3576 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3577
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003578- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3579 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3580 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003581 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003582
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003583- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3584 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3585 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3586 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003587 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3588 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3589 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3590 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003591
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003592- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3593 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003594
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003595- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3596
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003597- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3598 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3599
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003600- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3601 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3602 supported.
3603
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003604- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3605
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003606- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3607 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003608
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003609- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3610 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3611
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003612- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3613
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003614- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3615 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3616
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003617- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3618 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3619 functions but callable type objects.
3620
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003621- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003622 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003623 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003624
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003625- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3626 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003627
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003628- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3629 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003630
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003631- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3632 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3633 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3634 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3635
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003636- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3637 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003638
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003639- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3640 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3641 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3642 and __imul__.
3643
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003644- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003645 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3646 is called.
3647
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003648- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3649 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3650 interpreter was compiled.
3651
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003652- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3653 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3654 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003655 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003656 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3657 1, not 2.
3658
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003659- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3660 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3661 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3662 limit.
3663
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003664- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3665 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3666 bug #623464.
3667
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003668- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3669 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3670 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3671 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3672
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003673Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003674-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003675
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003676- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3677
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003678- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3679 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3680 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3681 with Python 2.3a2.
3682
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003683- os.path exposes getctime.
3684
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003685- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003686 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003687 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003688 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003689 unit tests of floating point results.
3690
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003691- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3692 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3693 has been increased.
3694
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003695- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3696 executed.
3697
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003698- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3699 postinstallation script.
3700
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003701- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3702 test the current module.
3703
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003704- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003705 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3706 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3707 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3708 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3709
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003710- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003711 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003712 Ward's Optik package.
3713
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003714- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3715 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3716 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3717 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3718
3719- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3720 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003721 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003722
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003723- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3724 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3725 shelf are binary pickles.
3726
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003727- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3728 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3729
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003730- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3731 modules are iterators now.
3732
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003733- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3734 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3735 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3736 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3737 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3738 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003739
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003740- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3741 with their entity value.
3742
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003743- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3744
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003745- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3746 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003747
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003748- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3749 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003750 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003751
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003752- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3753 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3754 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3755 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3756 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3757 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3758 main():
3759
3760 import locale
3761 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3762
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003763- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3764 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3765
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003766- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3767 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3768 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3769 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3770 to the new standard.
3771
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003772- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3773 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3774 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3775 an extension to the database.
3776
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003777- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3778 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3779 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3780 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003781 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003782
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003783- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003784 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003785
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003786- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3787 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3788 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3789 bounded integers.
3790
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003791- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3792 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3793 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3794 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3795 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3796 in existence.
3797
3798 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3799 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3800 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3801 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3802 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3803 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3804
3805 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3806 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3807 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3808 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3809
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003810- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3811 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3812 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3813
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003814- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3815
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003816- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3817 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3818 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3819 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3820
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003821- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3822 argument.
3823
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003824- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3825 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3826 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3827 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3828 [SF patch 560794].
3829
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003830- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3831 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3832 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003833 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3834 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3835 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003836
3837- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3838 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003839
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003840- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3841 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3842 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3843 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003844
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003845- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3846 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3847 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3848 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3849 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3850
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003851- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003852
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003853- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3854
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003855- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3856 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3857 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3858 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3859 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3860 identical to None.
3861
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003862- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3863 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3864 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3865 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3866 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3867 results now.
3868
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003869- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3870 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3871
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003872- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3873 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3874 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3875 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3876 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3877 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3878 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3879 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3880
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003881- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3882
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003883- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3884 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3885
3886- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3887 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3888 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3889 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3890 and other systems.
3891
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003892- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3893 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3894 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3895 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 +00003896 work well with these.
3897
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003898- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3899
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003900- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003901 connections.
3902
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003903- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3904 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3905 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3906
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003907- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3908 sets
3909
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003910- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3911 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3912 name.
3913
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003914- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3915 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3916 passed in.
3917
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003918- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003919 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003920 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3921 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003922
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003923- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3924
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003925- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3926
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003927- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3928 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3929 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3930
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003931- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3932 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3933 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3934 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003935 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003936
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003937- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003938 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003939 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003940
3941- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3942 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3943 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3944
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003945- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003946 the value of its expression argument.
3947
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003948- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3949 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3950 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3951
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003952- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3953 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3954 skipstone browser was included.
3955
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003956- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3957 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3958
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003959Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003960-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003961
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003962- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3963 names in addition to accepting file names.
3964
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003965- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3966 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3967 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3968 still used and useful.)
3969
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003970- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3971 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3972 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3973 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003974
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003975- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3976 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3977 the generated binary.
3978
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003979Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003980-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003981
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003982- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3983
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003984- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3985 except in the hands of experts.
3986
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003987- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003988 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3989 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3990 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003991
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003992- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3993 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3994 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3995 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3996 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3997 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3998 builds.
3999
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004000- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4001 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4002 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4003 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4004 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4005 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4006 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4007 new type.
4008
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004009- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004010
4011 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4012 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4013 positive infinities.
4014
4015 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4016 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4017 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4018 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4019 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4020 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4021 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4022
4023 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4024
4025 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4026
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004027- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4028 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4029 size of the executable.
4030
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004031- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4032 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4033 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4034 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004035
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004036- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4037
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004038- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4039 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4040 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004041
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004042- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4043 well as Unix.
4044
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004045- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4046 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4047 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4048 modules in the README file for details.
4049
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004050C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004051-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004052
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004053- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4054 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004055 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004056 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004057 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004058
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004059- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4060 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4061 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4062 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4063 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4064 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004065 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004066 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4067 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4068 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4069 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4070 aligned.)
4071
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004072- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4073 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4074 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4075
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004076- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4077 level.
4078
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004079- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4080 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4081 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4082 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4083 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4084
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004085- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4086 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4087 code.
4088
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004089- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4090 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4091 adjusting for negative indices.
4092
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004093- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4094 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4095 object.
4096
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004097- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4098 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4099 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4100
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004101- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4102 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004103
4104- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4105
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004106- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4107 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4108 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4109 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4110
4111- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4112
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004113- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004114
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004115- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004116 without going through the buffer API.
4117
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004118- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004119
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004120- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4121 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4122 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4123 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4124
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004125- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4126 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4127
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004128- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004129 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4130
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004131New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004133
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004134- OpenVMS is now supported.
4135
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004136- AtheOS is now supported.
4137
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004138- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4139
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004140- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4141
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004142Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004143-----
4144
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004145- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4146 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4147 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004148
4149Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004150-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004151
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004152- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4153 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4154 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4155 bugs.
4156 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004157 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004158 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4159 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004160 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004161
4162- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004163 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004164
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004165- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4166 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4167
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004168- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4169 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004170 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004171 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4172
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004173- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4174 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4175 use files" uninstall option).
4176
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004177- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4178
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004179- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4180 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4181
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004182- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4183 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4184 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4185
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004186- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4187 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4188 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4189 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4190 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004191 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4192 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4193 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004194
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004195- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004196 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004197 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4198 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4199 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4200 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4201 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4202 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4203 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4204 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4205 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4206 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4207 work around.
4208
4209- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4210 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4211 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4212 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4213 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4214 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4215 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4216 specified with O_CREAT too).
4217
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004218Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004219----
4220
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004221- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004222
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004223- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4224 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4225 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4226
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004227- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4228 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4229 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4230
4231- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4232 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4233 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4234 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4235 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4236 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4237 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4238 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004239
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004240- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4241 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4242 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004243
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004244- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4245 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4246 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4247 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4248 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004249
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004250- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4251 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4252 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004253
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004254- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4255 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004256
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004257- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4258 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4259 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4260 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4261 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004262
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004263- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4264 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4265 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4266
4267- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4268 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4269 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004270
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004271- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4272 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4273 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4274 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004275 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004276
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004277- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4278 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004279
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004280- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4281 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004282
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004283- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004284 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004285 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4286 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004287
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004288
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004289What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004290===============================
4291
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4293
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004294Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004295--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004296
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004297- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4298 with a custom metaclass.
4299
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004300Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004301-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004302
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004303- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4304 are proxies.
4305
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004306Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004307-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004308
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004309- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4310 very short strings.
4311
4312- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4313 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4314 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4315 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4316 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4317
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004318Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004319-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004320
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004321- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4322 close or delete time).
4323
4324- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4325 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4326
4327- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4328
4329- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004330 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004331
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004332Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004333-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004334
4335Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004336-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004337
4338C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004339-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004340
4341New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004342-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004343
4344Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004345-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004346
4347Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004348-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004349
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004350- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4351
4352- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4353 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4354
4355- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4356 deleted at process exit time.
4357
4358- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4359 in backslash.
4360
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004361Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004362----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004363
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004364- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4365 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4366 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4367
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004368
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004369What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004370===========================
4371
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004372*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4373
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004374Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004375--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004376
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004377- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4378 been extensively updated. See
4379
4380 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4381
4382 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4383
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004384- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4385 deleted!
4386
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004387- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4388 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4389 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4390 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4391 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4392
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004393- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4394
4395 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4396 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4397
4398 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4399 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4400 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4401 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4402 supported anyway.
4403
4404 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4405 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4406
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004407- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4408 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4409 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4410 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4411 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004412
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004413- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4414 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4415 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4416
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004417Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004418-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004419
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004420- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4421 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4422 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4423 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4424 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4425 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004426 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4427 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4428 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4429 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004430
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004431- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4432 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4433 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4434
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004435Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004436-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004437
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004438- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4439
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004440Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004441-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004442
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004443- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4444 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4445 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4446 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4447 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4448 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4449
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004450- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4451
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004452- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4453
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004454- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4455
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004456- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4457 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4458 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4459
4460- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4461
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004462Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004463-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004464
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004465- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4466 off a search on Google.
4467
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004468Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004470
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004471- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4472 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4473 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4474 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4475 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4476 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4477 other platforms should do likewise.
4478
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004479- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4480 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4481 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4482
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004483C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004484-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004485
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004486- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4487 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4488 producing key-value pairs.
4489
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004490- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004491 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004492 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4493 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4494 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4495 previously went unchallenged.
4496
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004497New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004498-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004499
4500Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004501-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004502
4503Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004505
4506Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004507----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004508
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004509- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4510 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004511
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004512- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4513 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4514 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4515 home.
4516
4517
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004518What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004519===========================
4520
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004521*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4522
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004523Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004524--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004525
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004526- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4527 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004528
4529 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004530 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004531
4532 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4533 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004534 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004535 This needs to be documented.
4536
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004537- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4538 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4539
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004540- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4541 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4542 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4543
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004544- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4545 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4546
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004547- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4548 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4549 class forbids it).
4550
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004551- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4552 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4553 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4554
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004555- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4556
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004557Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004558-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004559
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004560- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4561 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004562 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004563
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004564- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4565 (like 1 + '').
4566
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004567Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004568-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004569
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004570- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4571 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4572 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4573 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004574 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004575 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4576
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004577- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4578 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4579 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4580 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4581
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004582- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4583 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004584 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4585 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4586 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004587
4588- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4589 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004590
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004591- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4592 bytes on its input.
4593
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004594Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004595-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004596
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004597- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004598 convenience function.
4599
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004600- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4601 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4602 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004603 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4604 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4605 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4606 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4607 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4608 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004609
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004610- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4611 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4612 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4613 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4614
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004615- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4616 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4617 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4618
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004619- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4620 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4621 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4622 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4623
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004624- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4625 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004626 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004627 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4628 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4629 new -l and -e options.
4630
4631- statcache is now deprecated.
4632
4633- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4634 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004635 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004636 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4637 time properly taken into account.
4638
4639- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4640 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4641 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4642 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4643
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004644Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004645-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004646
4647Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004648-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004649
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004650- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4651 is built with libdb3 if available.
4652
4653- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4654
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004655C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004656-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004657
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004658- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4659 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4660 PySequence_Size().
4661
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004662- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4663
4664- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4665 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4666 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4667
4668- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4669 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4670
4671- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4672 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4673
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004674New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004675-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004676
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004677- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4678 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4679
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004680- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4681 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4682
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004683- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4684
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004685Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004686-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004687
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004688- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4689 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4690
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004691Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004692-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004693
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004694Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004695----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004696
4697- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4698 removed completely in the next release.
4699
4700- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4701 OSX.
4702
4703- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4704 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4705
4706- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4707
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004708
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004709What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004710===========================
4711
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004712*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4713
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004714Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004715--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004716
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004717- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004718 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004719 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004720 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4721 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004722 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4723 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004724 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4725 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004726
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004727- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4728 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4729
4730- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4731 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4732
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004733Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004734-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004735
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004736- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4737 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4738 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4739 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4740 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4741 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4742 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4743 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4744
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004745- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4746 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4747 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4748 example).
4749
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004750- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004751 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004752 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004753 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004754
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004755- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4756 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4757 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004758 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004759
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004760- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4761 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4762 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4763 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4764 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4765 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4766
4767 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4768
4769 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4770
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004771Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004772-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004773
4774- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4775
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004776- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4777
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004778- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4779 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004780
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004781- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4782 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4783 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4784 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4785 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4786 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004787 attributes.
4788
4789- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4790 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4791 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004792
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004793- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4794 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4795 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004796
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004797- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4798 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4799 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004800 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4801 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4802
4803- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4804 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004805
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004806Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004807-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004808
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004809- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4810 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4811
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004812- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4813 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4814 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4815 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4816
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004817- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4818 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4819 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4820 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4821
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004822 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4823 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4824 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4825 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4826 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4827 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4828 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4829 without losing information).
4830
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004831- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004832 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4833 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4834 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4835 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4836 module).
4837
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004838 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004839 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4840 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4841 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4842 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004843
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004844- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004845 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4846 encoding.
4847
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004848- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4849 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4850
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004851- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004852 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4853
4854- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4855 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4856 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4857 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4858
4859- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4860
4861- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4862 ON, and OFF.
4863
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004864- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4865 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4866
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004867Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004868-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004869
4870- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4871 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4872 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004873
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004874- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4875 been added: -X and -E.
4876
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004877Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004878-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004879
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004880- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4881 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4882
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004883C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004884-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004885
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004886- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4887 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4888 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4889 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4890 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4891
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004892- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4893 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4894 as long) arguments.
4895
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004896- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4897 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4898 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4899 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4900 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4901 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4902
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004903- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4904 input.
4905
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004906New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004907-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004908
4909Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004910-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004911
4912Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004913-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004914
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004915- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4916 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4917 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4918
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004919- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4920 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4921 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004922 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004923
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004924 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4925 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4926 import signal
4927 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004928
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004929 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004930 while 1:
4931 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004932 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004933 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4934 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4935 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4936 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004937
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004938
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004939What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4940===========================
4941
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004942*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4943
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004944Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004945--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004946
4947- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4948 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4949 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4950
4951- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4952 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4953 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4954 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4955 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4956 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4957 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004958
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004959- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004960 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004961 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4962 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4963 associate a docstring with a property.
4964
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004965- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4966 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4967 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4968 other built-in object types.
4969
4970- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4971 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4972 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4973 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4974 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4975
4976- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4977 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4978
4979- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4980 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004981 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004982 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4983 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4984 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4985 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4986 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4987
4988- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4989 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4990 class.
4991
4992- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4993 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4994 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4995 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4996
4997- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4998 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4999 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5000 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5001
5002- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5003 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5004
5005- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5006 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5007 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5008 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5009 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005010 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005011 with the same value as s.
5012
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005013- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5014
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005015Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005016----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005017
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005018- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5019
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005020- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5021 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5022 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5023 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5024 objects.
5025
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005026- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5027 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005028 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5029 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5030
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005031- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5032 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5033 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5034
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005035Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005036-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005037
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005038- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5039 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5040 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5041 by the instances.
5042
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005043- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5044 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5045 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5046
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005047- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5048 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5049 before the entire comparison is complete.
5050
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005051- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5052 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5053 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5054
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005055- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5056 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5057 getwriter().
5058
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005059- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5060 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5061
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005062- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005063 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5064 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5065
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005066- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5067 iterable object.
5068
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005069- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5070 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005071
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005072- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5073 authentication.
5074
5075- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5076 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005077
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005078- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005079 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5080 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5081 a sample driver.)
5082
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005083Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005084-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005085
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005086- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5087 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5088 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5089 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5090 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5091 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5092 kernel has large file support.
5093
5094- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5095 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5096 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5097 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5098 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5099
5100- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5101 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5102 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5103
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005104C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005105-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005106
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005107- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5108 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5109
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005110New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005111-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005112
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005113- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5114 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5115
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005116Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005117-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005118
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005119- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5120 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5121 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5122 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5123 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5124
5125- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5126 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5127 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5128 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5129
5130- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5131 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5132
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005133Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005134-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005135
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005136- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005137 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5138 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005139
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005140
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005141What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5142===========================
5143
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005144*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5145
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005146Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005147----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005148
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005149- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5150 big to represent as a C double.
5151
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005152- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5153 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5154 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5155 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5156 restriction).
5157
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005158- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5159 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5160 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5161 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5162 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5163
5164 >>> dir([])
5165 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5166 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5167 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5168 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5169 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5170 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5171 'reverse', 'sort']
5172
5173 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5174
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005175- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005176 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5177 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5178 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5179 OverflowError exception.
5180
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005181- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005182 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005183 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5184 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5185 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5186 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5187 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005188 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005189 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5190 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5191
5192 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5193 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5194 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5195 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005196
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005197- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005198 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5199 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5200 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5201 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5202 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5203 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5204 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5205 once it is created.
5206
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005207- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5208 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5209 (key, value) pairs.
5210
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005211- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005212 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5213 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5214
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005215- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5216 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5217 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5218 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5219 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005220
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005221- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005222 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5223 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5224
5225 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5226
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005227- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005228 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5229
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005230Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005231-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005232
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005233- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005234 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5235 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005236
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005237- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5238 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5239 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5240 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5241 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5242 in this area anymore).
5243
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005244- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5245 threading.Timer.
5246
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005247- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5248 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5249
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005250- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005251 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5252
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005253- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005254 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5255 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5256 converted to Python longs.
5257
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005258- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005259 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5260
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005261- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5262 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5263 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5264
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005265Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005266-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005267
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005268- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5269 division operators as per PEP 238.
5270
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005271Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005272-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005273
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005274- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5275 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5276 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5277 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5278
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005279C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005280-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005281
5282- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005283
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005284- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5285 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005286 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005287
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005288 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5289 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005290 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005291 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005292
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005293- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005294 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5295 module:
5296
5297 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005298
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005299 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5300 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005301
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005302 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5303 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005304
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005305 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5306
5307 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5308
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005309- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005310 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5311 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5312 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005313
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005314New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005315-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005316
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005317- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5318 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5319 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5320 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5321 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005322
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005323Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005324-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005325
5326Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005327-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005328
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005329- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5330 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5331 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5332 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005333 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5334 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5335 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5336 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5337 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005338
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005339- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005340 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5341
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005342
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005343What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5344===========================
5345
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005346*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5347
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005348Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005349-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005350
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005351- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5352 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5353
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005354- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5355 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5356 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005357
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005358- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5359 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5360 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5361 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005362
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005363- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5364
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005365- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005366
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005367Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005368-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005369
5370- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005371 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005372 the module docstring for details.
5373
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005374Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005375-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005376
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005377- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005378 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5379 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5380 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005381
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005382- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5383 Nick Mathewson.
5384
5385Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005386----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005387
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005388- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5389 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5390 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5391 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5392 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5393 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5394 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5395 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5396
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005397- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5398 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5399 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5400 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5401
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005402- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5403 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5404 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5405 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5406 come a long way).
5407
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005408- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5409 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5410 write filters for these warnings).
5411
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005412- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5413 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5414 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5415 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5416 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5417
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005418- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5419 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5420 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5421 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5422 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5423 older distribution.
5424
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005425Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005426-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005427
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005428- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5429 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005430 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005431
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005432- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5433 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5434 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5435
5436- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5437
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005438- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5439
5440- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5441
5442- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5443
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005444- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005445
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005446- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5447
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005448New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005449-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005450
5451C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005452-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005453
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005454- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5455 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5456 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5457 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5458 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5459 against buffer overruns.
5460
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005461- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005462 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5463 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005464 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5465 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5466 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5467
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005468- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5469 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5470 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5471 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5472 deprecated.
5473
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005474Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005475-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005476
5477- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5478 relevant is found.
5479
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005480
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005481What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005482===========================
5483
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005484*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5485
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005486Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005487----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005488
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005489- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5490 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5491 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5492 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5493 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5494 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5495 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5496 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005497 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005498 repaired.
5499
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005500- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005501 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005502 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5503 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5504 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5505 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5506 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5507 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5508 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5509 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5510
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005511- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5512 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5513 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5514 leading BMO character).
5515
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005516- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5517 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5518 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5519
5520 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5521 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5522 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005523
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005524 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5525 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5526 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5527 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5528 for various simple to use conversions.
5529
5530 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5531 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5532
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005533 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5534 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5535 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5536 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5537 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5538 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5539 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5540 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5541 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5542 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5543 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5544 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5545 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5546 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5547 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005548
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005549- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5550 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5551 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005552 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005553 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005554
5555 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005556 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5557 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5558 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5559 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5560 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005561 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5562 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005563
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005564 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5565 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5566 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005567 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005568
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005569- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5570 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5571 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5572 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5573 floating arithmetic,
5574
5575 x = 9007199254740992.0
5576 print long(x)
5577
5578 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5579 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5580 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5581 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5582 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5583 functions are of good quality).
5584
5585 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5586 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5587 algorithms to break.
5588
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005589- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5590 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5591 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5592 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5593 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5594 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5595 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5596 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5597 order.
5598
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005599- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5600 operation along the most common code paths.
5601
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005602- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5603 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5604
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005605- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5606 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5607 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5608 {}.update(UserDict())
5609
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005610- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5611 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5612 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5613 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5614 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5615 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5616 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5617 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5618
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005619- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005620 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005621
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005622 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005623 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5624 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005625 join() method of strings
5626 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005627 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5628 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005629 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005630 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005631
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005632- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5633 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5634
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005635- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5636 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5637
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005638- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5639 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5640 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5641 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5642
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005643- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5644 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005645 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005646 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5647 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005648
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005649- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5650
5651
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005652Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005653-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005654
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005655- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005656 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005657 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5658 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5659
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005660- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5661 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5662
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005663- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5664 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5665 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5666 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5667
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005668- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5669 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5670 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5671
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005672- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5673
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005674- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5675
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005676- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5677 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5678 that are still imported into string.py).
5679
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005680- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5681
5682- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5683 Now it does.
5684
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005685- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5686
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005687- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5688 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5689 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5690 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5691 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005692 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5693 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005694
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005695- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5696 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5697 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5698 'help(object)'.
5699
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005700Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005701-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005702
5703- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005704 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005705 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5706 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5707
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005708- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005709 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5710 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005711
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005712C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005713-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005714
5715- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5716 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005717
5718----
5719
5720**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**