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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +000015- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
16 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
17
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000018- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000019 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000020
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000021- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000022 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000023 which was missing for no apparent reason.
24
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000025- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000026 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
27 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
28
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000029- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
30 types that support garbage collection.
31
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000032- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
33
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000034- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
35 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
36 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
37 Jython.
38
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +000039- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
40
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000041Extension modules
42-----------------
43
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +000044- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
45
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000046Library
47-------
48
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +000049- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
50 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
51 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
52
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +000053- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
54
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +000055- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
56 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
57
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +000058- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
59 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
60 when dummy_threading is being used.
61
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +000062- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
63 from a tarfile.
64
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000065- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +000066 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000067
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +000068- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
69 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
70 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
71 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
72
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +000073- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
74 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
75
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +000076- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
77 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
78 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
79 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
80 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
81 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
82 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
83 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
84 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
85 by some other method in progress).
86
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000087- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
88 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
89 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +000090
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +000091- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
92
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +000093- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
94 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
95 AM Kuchling.
96
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000097- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
98 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
99 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
100
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000101- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
102 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
103 instead of unsigned.
104
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000105- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000106 no longer part of the public API.
107
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000108- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
109 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
110 string methods of the same name).
111
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000112- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
113 SF patch 982681.
114
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000115- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000116 SF patch 945642.
117
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000118- doctest unittest integration improvements:
119
120 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
121
122 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
123 DocTestSuites.
124
125- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
126 that provide thread-local data.
127
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000128- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
129 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
130
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000131- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
132
133- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
134 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
135 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
136
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000137
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000138Tools/Demos
139-----------
140
141Build
142-----
143
144C API
145-----
146
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000147- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
148 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
149
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000150Documentation
151-------------
152
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000153- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000154
155 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
156 assigning thier values
157
158 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
159
160 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
161
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000162- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000163
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000164New platforms
165-------------
166
167Tests
168-----
169
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000170- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000171 platforms that use the Makefile.
172
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000173- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
174 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
175 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
176
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000177Windows
178-------
179
180Mac
181---
182
183
184
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000185What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
186=================================
187
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000188*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000189
190Core and builtins
191-----------------
192
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000193- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
194 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
195 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
196 objects now (one object instead of three).
197
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000198- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
199 Windows DLLs.
200
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000201- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
202
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000203- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
204 a new .pyc magic.
205
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000206- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
207 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
208 be there.
209
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000210- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
211 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
212 the LC_NUMERIC category.
213
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000214- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
215 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
216 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
217
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000218- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
219
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000220- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
221 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
222 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000223
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000224- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
225 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
226
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000227- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
228
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000229- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000230 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000231
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000232- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
233
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000234- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
235
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000236- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
237 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
238
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000239- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
240 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
241 Fixes bug #858016 .
242
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000243- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
244 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
245 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
246
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000247- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
248 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
249 improves their performance (about 35%).
250
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000251- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
252 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
253 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
254
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000255- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
256 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
257 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
258 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
259
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000260- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
261 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
262 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
263 length is not known).
264
265- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
266 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000267 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
268 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000269 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
270
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000271- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
272 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
273
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000274- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
275 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
276 keyword arguments.
277
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000278- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
279 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
280 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
281
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000282- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
283 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
284 cases.
285
286- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
287 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
288 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
289 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
290 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
291 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
292 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
293 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
294 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
295 a release build.
296
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000297- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
298 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
299
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000300- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000301 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000302
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000303- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
304 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
305 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
306 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
307 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
308 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
309 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
310 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
311 destroyed.
312
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000313- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
314 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
315 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
316 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
317 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
318 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
319 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
320 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
321
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000322- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
323 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
324 character other than a space.
325
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000326- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
327 by the function object or by the method object, the function
328 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
329 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
330 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
331 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
332 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
333 attributes with the same name.
334
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000335- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
336 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
337 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
338 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
339 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
340 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
341 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
342 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
343 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
344 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
345 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
346 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
347 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
348 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000349
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000350- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
351 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
352 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
353 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
354 This has been repaired.
355
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000356- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
357
358- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
359
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000360- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
361 over a sequence.
362
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000363- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000364 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000365
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000366- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
367
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000368- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
369 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
370 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
371 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
372 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
373 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
374 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
375 records with equal keys is unchanged).
376
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000377- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
378 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
379 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
380
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000381- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
382 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
383 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
384 freelist.
385
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000386- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
387 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
388
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000389- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
390 number.
391
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000392- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
393 a TypeError exception.
394
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000395- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
396 820195.
397
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000398- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
399 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
400 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
401
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000402- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000403 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
404 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000405
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000406- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
407 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
408 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
409
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000410- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
411 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000412 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000413
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000414- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000415 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
416 the first call.
417
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000418
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000419Extension modules
420-----------------
421
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000422- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
423 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
424
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000425- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
426 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
427 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
428 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
429 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
430 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
431 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000432
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000433- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
434
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000435- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
436
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000437- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
438 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
439
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000440- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
441 fewer false positives.
442
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000443- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
444 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
445
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000446- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000447 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
448
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000449- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000450 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000451 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
452 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
453 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000454
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000455- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
456 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
457 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
458 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
459
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000460- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
461 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
462 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
463 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
464 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
465 #897625.
466
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000467- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
468 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
469
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000470- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
471 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
472 and pops on either side of the deque.
473
474- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
475 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
476
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000477- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
478 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
479 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
480 other functions that expect a function argument.
481
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000482- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
483
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000484- os.getsid was added.
485
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000486- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
487 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
488 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
489
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000490- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
491
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000492- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
493
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000494- readline.clear_history was added.
495
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000496- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
497
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000498- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
499
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000500- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
501
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000502- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
503
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000504- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
505
506- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
507
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000508- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
509
510- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
511
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000512- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
513 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
514 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
515
516- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
517 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
518 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
519 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
520 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
521 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
522 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
523
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000524- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
525 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
526 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
527 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000528
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000529- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000530 iterators from a single iterable.
531
532- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
533 of raising a TypeError exception.
534
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000535- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
536 as parameter.
537
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000538Library
539-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000540
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000541- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
542 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
543 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000544
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000545- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
546 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
547 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000548
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000549- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000550
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000551- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
552 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000553
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000554- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
555 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
556
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000557- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
558
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000559- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000560 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000561
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000562- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
563 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
564
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000565- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
566
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000567- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
568 on cygwin and mingw32.
569
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000570- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
571
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000572- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
573 module.
574
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000575- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
576 installation scheme for all platforms.
577
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000578- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000579 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000580
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000581- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
582 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
583 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
584
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000585- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
586 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
587 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
588
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000589- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
590
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000591- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
592
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000593- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
594 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
595
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000596- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
597 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
598 type pattern with the same value exists.
599
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000600- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
601 when run from the command prompt).
602
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000603- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
604 not taken into consideration when caching value.
605
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000606- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
607 default sort).
608
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000609- Added global runctx function to profile module
610
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000611- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
612
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000613- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
614
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000615- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
616
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000617- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000618 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
619 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
620 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
621 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
622 accordingly.
623
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000624- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
625 decoding standards.
626
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000627- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
628 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
629 called for all requests.
630
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000631- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
632 they are passed to the compiler.
633
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000634- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
635 indent, width and depth.
636
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000637- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
638 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
639
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000640- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
641 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
642
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000643- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
644
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000645- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
646
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000647- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
648
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000649- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
650 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
651
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000652- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000653 for better performance.
654
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000655- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000656
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000657- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
658 a string).
659
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000660- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
661
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000662- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
663
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000664- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
665
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000666- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
667
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000668- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
669 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
670 list of fieldnames.
671
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000672- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
673 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
674
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000675- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
676
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000677- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
678 empty lists.
679
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000680- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
681 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
682 and shelves.
683
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000684- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
685 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
686
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000687- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000688 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
689 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000690
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000691- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
692 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000693 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000694
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000695- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000696 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
697 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
698
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000699- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
700 and removed in Py2.4.
701
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000702- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
703
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000704- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
705
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000706Tools/Demos
707-----------
708
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000709- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
710 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
711
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000712- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
713
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000714- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
715 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
716 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
717 destination in situations where both files are given.
718
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000719- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
720 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
721 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
722 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
723
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000724- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
725
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000726- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
727 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
728 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
729 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
730 now.
731
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000732- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
733 in effect
734
735- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
736 C-c C-h
737
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000738- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
739 -d option was given.
740
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000741Build
742-----
743
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000744- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
745 build under OS X.
746
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000747- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
748 --enable-profiling.
749
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000750- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
751 is configured --with-tsc.
752
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000753- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
754 on AMD64.
755
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000756- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
757 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
758
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000759- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
760 removed.
761
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000762- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
763 supported (see PEP 11).
764
765- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
766
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000767- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
768
769- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
770 (see PEP 11).
771
772- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
773 sizeof(char) must be 1.
774
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000775C API
776-----
777
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000778- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
779 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
780 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
781
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000782- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
783 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
784 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
785 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
786
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000787- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
788 generator objects.
789
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000790- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
791 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000792 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
793 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000794
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000795- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
796 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
797
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000798- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
799 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
800 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
801 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
802 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
803
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000804- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
805 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
806 about 10% faster.
807
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000808- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
809 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
810
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000811- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
812 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
813 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
814 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
815
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000816Windows
817-------
818
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000819- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
820 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
821 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
822 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
823
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000824- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
825 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
826 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
827
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000828
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000829What's New in Python 2.3 final?
830===============================
831
832*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
833
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000834IDLE
835----
836
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000837- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
838 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
839 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
840 context-menu actions.
841
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000842- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
843 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
844 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
845 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
846 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
847 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
848 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
849 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
850 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
851
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000852
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000853What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
854=============================================
855
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000856*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000857
858Core and builtins
859-----------------
860
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000861- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000862 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000863 comment at the end are still unsupported.
864
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000865Extension modules
866-----------------
867
868- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
869 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
870 than once. This has been fixed.
871
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000872- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
873 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
874 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
875 call.
876
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000877- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
878
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000879Library
880-------
881
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000882- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
883 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
884
885- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
886 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
887 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
888 restored.
889
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000890IDLE
891----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000892
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000893- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000894
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000895Build
896-----
897
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000898- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
899 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
900
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000901C API
902-----
903
904Windows
905-------
906
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000907- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
908 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
909
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000910- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
911
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000912Mac
913---
914
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000915- Various fixes to pimp.
916
917- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
918
919- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
920 more problems than it solves.
921
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000922
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000923What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
924=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000925
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000926*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
927
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000928Core and builtins
929-----------------
930
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000931- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
932 by sys.setcheckinterval().
933
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000934- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
935 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000936 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000937
938- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
939 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
940 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000941 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000942
943- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
944 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000945
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000946- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
947 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
948 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
949
950- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000951 770247.
952
953- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000954
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000955Extension modules
956-----------------
957
958- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
959 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
960
961- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
962
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000963- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
964
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000965- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
966 contained within the _strptime module.
967
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000968- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
969 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
970
971- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000972 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
973
974- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
975 the find_class attribute, if present.
976
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000977- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000978
979 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
980 (SF bug 763298).
981
982 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000983 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
984 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
985 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000986
987 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
988
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000989Library
990-------
991
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000992- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
993
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000994- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
995 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
996 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
997 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
998 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
999 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1000 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1001 or Tester().
1002
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001003- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1004 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1005 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1006 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1007 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1008 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1009 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1010 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1011 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001012
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001013 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001014
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001015- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1016 weren't before was an oversight.
1017
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001018- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1019 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1020
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001021- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1022 when there are no lines.
1023
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001024- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1025 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1026
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001027- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1028 to child processes.
1029
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001030- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1031
1032- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1033
1034- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1035 xmlrpclib.
1036
1037- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1038 responses.
1039
1040- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1041 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1042
1043- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1044 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1045 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1046
1047- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1048 used as patterns.
1049
1050- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1051 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1052 than Tk 8.3.
1053
1054- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1055
1056- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001057
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001058Tools/Demos
1059-----------
1060
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001061- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1062
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001063- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1064
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001065- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001066
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001067Build
1068-----
1069
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001070- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1071
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001072- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1073
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001074- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1075 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001076
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001077- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1078 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1079 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001080
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001081C API
1082-----
1083
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001084- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1085 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1086
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001087Windows
1088-------
1089
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001090- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1091 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1092 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1093 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1094 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1095 Python exception ::
1096
1097 thread.error: can't start new thread
1098
1099 is raised now.
1100
1101- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1102 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1103 instead of from DLL teardown.
1104
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001105Mac
1106---
1107
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001108- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001109 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001110 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1111 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1112 the executable in the bundle.
1113
1114- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001115
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001116- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1117
1118- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1119 on Panther.
1120
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001121What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1122================================
1123
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001124*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001125
1126Core and builtins
1127-----------------
1128
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001129- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1130 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1131 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1132 with the -i option.
1133
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001134- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1135 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1136
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001137- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1138 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1139
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001140- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1141 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1142 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1143 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1144 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1145 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1146 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1147 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1148 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1149 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1150 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1151 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1152 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001153
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001154- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1155 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1156 embedded in a lambda expression.
1157
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001158- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1159 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1160 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1161 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1162 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1163
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001164- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1165 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1166 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1167
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001168- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1169 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1170
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001171- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1172 It's writable again.
1173
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001174- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1175 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1176 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001177 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001178
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001179- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1180 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1181 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1182
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001183Extension modules
1184-----------------
1185
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001186- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1187 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1188
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001189- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1190 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1191 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1192 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1193
1194- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1195 collection.
1196
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001197- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1198 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1199 unique within a single program run.
1200
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001201- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1202 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1203
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001204- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1205 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1206
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001207- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1208 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001209
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001210- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1211
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001212- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1213 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1214
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001215- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1216 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1217 for many BSD-derived systems.
1218
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001219
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001220Library
1221-------
1222
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001223- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1224 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1225 primary ones:
1226
1227 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1228 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1229 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1230
1231 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1232 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1233 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1234 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1235 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1236 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1237
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001238- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1239 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1240 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1241 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1242 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1243 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1244 argument.
1245
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001246- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1247 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1248 in the archive.
1249
1250- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1251 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1252
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001253- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1254 569574).
1255
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001256- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1257 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1258 no more.
1259
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001260- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1261 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1262 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1263 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1264 code coverage.
1265
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001266- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1267 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1268 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001269 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1270 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001271
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001272- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1273 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1274 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001275 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001276
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001277- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1278
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001279- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1280 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1281 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1282 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1283
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001284- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1285 handling.
1286
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001287- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1288 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1289
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001290- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1291 in socket.py.
1292
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001293- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1294
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001295- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1296 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1297 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1298 opener with proxy support.
1299
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001300- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1301
1302- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1303
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001304Tools/Demos
1305-----------
1306
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001307- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1308
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001309- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1310
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001311- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1312 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001313
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001314- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1315 files.
1316
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001317Build
1318-----
1319
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001320- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001321 different root directory.
1322
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001323C API
1324-----
1325
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001326- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1327 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1328 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1329 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1330 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1331 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1332 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1333 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1334 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1335 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1336
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001337- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1338 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1339 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1340 from Python.
1341
1342
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001343New platforms
1344-------------
1345
1346None this time.
1347
1348Tests
1349-----
1350
1351- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1352 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1353
1354Windows
1355-------
1356
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001357- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1358
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001359- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1360 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1361 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1362 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1363 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1364 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1365 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1366 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1367 that's what it's for.
1368
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001369Mac
1370---
1371
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001372- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1373 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1374 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1375 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001376- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1377 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1378- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001379
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001380SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1381------------------------------------
1382
1383430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1384598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1385622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1386661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1387683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1388697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1389713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1390724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1391727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1392729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1393730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1394731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1395732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1396733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1397735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1398740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1399744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1400745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1401747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1402749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1403751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1404753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1405755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1406757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1407760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1408
1409
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001410What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1411================================
1412
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001413*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001414
1415Core and builtins
1416-----------------
1417
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001418- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1419 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1420
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001421- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1422 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1423 and cannot be strings).
1424
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001425- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1426 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1427 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1428 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1429
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001430- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1431 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1432 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1433 Python itself.
1434
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001435- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1436 the referenced object, if it has one.
1437
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001438- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1439 the thread started at
1440 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1441
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001442- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1443 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1444 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1445 placed on a list index.
1446
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001447- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1448 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1449 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1450 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1451
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001452- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1453 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1454 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1455 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1456 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1457 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1458 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1459
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001460- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1461 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1462 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1463 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1464 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1465
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001466- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1467 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001468
1469- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1470 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1471 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1472 #693195.)
1473
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001474- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1475 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001476
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001477- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001478 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001479 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1480 interpreter executions, would fail.
1481
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001482- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001483 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001484 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001485
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001486Extension modules
1487-----------------
1488
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001489- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1490 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1491 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1492 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1493
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001494- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1495 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1496
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001497- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1498 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1499 and Greg Chapman.)
1500
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001501- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1502 recursively.
1503
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001504- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001505 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1506 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1507 leaks.
1508
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001509- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1510
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001511- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1512 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1513 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1514 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1515 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1516 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1517 #705836.
1518
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001519- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001520 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1521
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001522- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1523 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1524 See SF bug #692416.
1525
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001526- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1527 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1528
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001529- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1530 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1531 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001532
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001533- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001534 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1535 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1536
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001537- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1538 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1539 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1540 timeouts to work properly.
1541
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001542Library
1543-------
1544
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001545- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1546 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1547 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1548 future release.
1549
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001550- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1551 for querying platform dependent features.
1552
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001553- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001554
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001555- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1556 pickle protocol versions.
1557
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001558- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1559 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1560 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1561
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001562- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1563
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001564- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1565 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1566 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1567 modules.
1568
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001569- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1570 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1571 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1572
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001573- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1574 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1575
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001576- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1577 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1578 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1579
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001580- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001581 MS Office extensions.
1582
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001583- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1584 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1585
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001586- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1587 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1588
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001589- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1590 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1591 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1592 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1593 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1594 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1595
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001596- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1597 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1598 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001599
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001600- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1601 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1602 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1603
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001604- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1605
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001606- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1607 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1608 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1609
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001610Tools/Demos
1611-----------
1612
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001613- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1614 See the module docstring for details.
1615
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001616Build
1617-----
1618
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001619- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1620 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001621
1622C API
1623-----
1624
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001625- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1626
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001627- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1628 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1629 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1630
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001631- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1632 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001633
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001634 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1635 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1636 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001637
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001638- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001639 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1640
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001641- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1642 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1643 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001644
1645New platforms
1646-------------
1647
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001648None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001649
1650Tests
1651-----
1652
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001653- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1654 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001655
1656Windows
1657-------
1658
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001659- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1660 function.
1661
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001662- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1663 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001664
1665Mac
1666---
1667
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001668- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1669 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001670
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001671- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1672 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001673
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001674- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1675 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1676 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001677
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001678- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001679 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1680 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001681
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001682- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1683 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001684
1685
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001686What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1687=================================
1688
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001689*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001690
1691Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001692-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001693
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001694- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1695 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1696 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1697
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001698- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1699 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1700 (SF patch #664376.)
1701
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001702- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1703 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1704 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1705 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1706 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1707 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001708 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001709
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001710- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1711 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1712 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1713 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001714 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001715
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001716- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1717 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1718 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1719 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1720 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1721 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1722 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1723 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1724 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1725 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1726 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1727
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001728- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1729 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1730 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1731 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1732 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1733 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1734
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001735- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1736 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1737
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001738- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1739 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1740 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1741 case.)
1742
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001743- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1744 passed as unicode strings.
1745
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001746- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1747 See SF bug #683467.
1748
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001749- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1750 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1751
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001752- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1753
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001754- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1755
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001756- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1757 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1758 arguments.
1759
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001760- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1761 See SF bug #667147.
1762
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001763- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001764 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001765 See SF bug #676155.
1766
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001767- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001768 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001769 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1770 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1771 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1772 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1773 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1774 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001775
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001776Extension modules
1777-----------------
1778
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001779- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1780 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1781 tp_as_number pointer.
1782
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001783- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1784 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1785 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1786 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1787 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1788
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001789- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1790
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001791- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1792
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001793- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001794 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001795 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1796 patch #678531.)
1797
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001798- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1799 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1800
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001801- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1802 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1803
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001804- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1805
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001806- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1807 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1808 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1809
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001810- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1811
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001812- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1813 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1814
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001815- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001816
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001817- datetime changes:
1818
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001819 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1820
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001821 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1822 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1823 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1824 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1825 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1826 now.
1827
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001828 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001829 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1830 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001831
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001832 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001833 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001834 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1835 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1836 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1837 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001838
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001839 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1840 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1841 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001842 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1843
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001844 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1845 by a later example coded by Guido.
1846
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001847 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001848 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1849 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1850 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001851 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1852 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1853
1854 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1855 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1856 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1857 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1858 tzinfo subclass instance.
1859
1860 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1861 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1862 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1863 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1864 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1865 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1866 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1867 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001868
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001869 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1870 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1871 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1872 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1873 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001874 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1875
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001876 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001877
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001878 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1879 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1880 as a naive datetime object.
1881
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001882 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1883 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1884 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1885
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001886 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1887 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1888 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1889 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1890 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1891 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1892 comparison.
1893
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001894 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1895 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1896 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1897 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001898 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001899
1900 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001901
1902 and ::
1903
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001904 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1905
1906 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1907 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1908 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1909 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1910
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001911 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1912 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1913 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1914 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1915 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1916
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001917 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1918 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001919 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1920 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001921
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001922Library
1923-------
1924
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001925- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1926 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1927
1928- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1929 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1930 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1931 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1932 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1933 See PEP 307 for details.
1934
1935- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1936 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1937
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001938- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1939 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001940 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001941 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1942 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001943 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001944
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001945- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1946 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1947
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001948- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1949 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1950 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1951
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001952- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1953
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001954- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1955 exception.
1956
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001957- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1958 class.
1959
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001960- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1961 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1962 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1963
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001964- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1965 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1966
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001967- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001968 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1969 See SF bug #659228.
1970
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001971- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1972 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1973 See SF patch #651082.
1974
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001975- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001976
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001977- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1978 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1979
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001980- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001981 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001982
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001983- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1984 DOS paths from other platforms.
1985
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001986Tools/Demos
1987-----------
1988
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001989- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1990 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1991 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1992 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1993 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1994 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1995 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1996 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1997 example:
1998
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001999 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2000 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002001
2002 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2003
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002004
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002005Build
2006-----
2007
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002008- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2009 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2010 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002011 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2012
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002013 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2014
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002015- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2016 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2017 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2018 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2019 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2020 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2021 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2022 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2023 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2024
2025- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2026 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2027 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2028 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2029
2030- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2031 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2032
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002033C API
2034-----
2035
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002036- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2037 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002038
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002039- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2040 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2041 tp_as_number pointer.
2042
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002043- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2044 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2045 (SF #681367)
2046
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002047- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2048 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2049 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2050 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002051
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002052Tests
2053-----
2054
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002055- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002056 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2057 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2058 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2059 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2060 pydoc.)
2061
2062- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2063
2064- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002065
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002066Windows
2067-------
2068
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002069- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2070 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2071 time).
2072
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002073- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2074 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2075
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002076- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2077 release without strong cryptography.
2078
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002079- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002080 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002081
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002082- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2083 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2084
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002085Mac
2086---
2087
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002088- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2089 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002090
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002091- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2092 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2093 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002094
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002095- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2096 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002097
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002098- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2099 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2100 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2101 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002102
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002103- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002104 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2105 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2106 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002107
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002108
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002109What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002110=================================
2111
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002112*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002113
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002114Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002115--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002116
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002117- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2118
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002119- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2120 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002121 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002122 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002123 a different meaning than before.
2124
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002125- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002126 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002127 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002128
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002129- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002130 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002131 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002132
2133- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2134 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2135 and deallocation.
2136
2137- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2138 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2139
2140- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2141 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2142 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2143 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2144 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2145
2146- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2147 now detected by the garbage collector.
2148
2149- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2150 [SF bug 519621]
2151
2152- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2153 identifier.
2154
2155- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2156 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2157 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2158 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2159 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2160 [SF bug 563060]
2161
2162- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2163 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2164 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2165 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2166 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2167
2168- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2169 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2170 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2171
2172- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2173
2174- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2175 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2176 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2177 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2178 state of the slots would be lost.)
2179
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002180Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002181-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002182
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002183- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002184 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2185 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2186 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2187 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002188 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2189 Jython 2.1.
2190
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002191- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002192 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002193 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2194 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2195 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2196 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2197 these, see PEP 302.
2198
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002199- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2200 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2201 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2202
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002203- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2204 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2205 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2206
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002207- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2208 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2209 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2210
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002211- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2212 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2213 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2214 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2215 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2216 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2217 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2218 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2219 releases or implementations.
2220
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002221- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002222 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2223 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002224
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002225- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2226 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2227
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002228- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2229 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2230 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2231
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002232- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2233 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2234
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002235- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2236 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002237 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2238 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002239
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002240- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2241 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2242 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2243 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2244 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2245
2246 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2247 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2248 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2249 pattern.
2250
2251 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2252 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2253 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2254 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2255
2256 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2257 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2258 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2259 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2260 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2261 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2262
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002263- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2264 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2265 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2266 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2267 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2268 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2269 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2270 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002271
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002272- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2273 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2274 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2275 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2276 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002277 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2278 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2279 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2280 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2281 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2282 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2283 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002284
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002285- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2286 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2287
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002288- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2289 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2290 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2291 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2292 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2293 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2294 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2295 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2296 to Zack Weinberg!
2297
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002298- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2299 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2300 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2301 type. This has been fixed now.
2302
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002303- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2304 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2305 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2306
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002307- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2308 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2309 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2310 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2311 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2312 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2313 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2314 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002315 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002316
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002317- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2318 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2319 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002320
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002321- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2322 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2323 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2324 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2325 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2326 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2327 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2328 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002329 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002330 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2331 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2332
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002333- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2334 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2335 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2336 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2337 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2338 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2339 this.)
2340
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002341- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2342 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002343 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002344 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002345 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2346 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002347 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2348 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002349
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002350- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2351 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2352 currently running.
2353
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002354- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2355 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2356 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2357 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2358
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002359- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2360 as directory names.
2361
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002362- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2363 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2364
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002365- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2366 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2367
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002368- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002369 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2370 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002371
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002372- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2373 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2374 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2375 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2376 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2377
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002378- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2379 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2380 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2381 removed.
2382
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002383- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2384 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2385 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2386
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002387- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2388 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2389 to __debug__.
2390
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002391- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2392 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2393 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2394
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002395- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2396 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2397 deprecated now.
2398
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002399- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2400 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2401 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002402
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002403- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2404 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2405 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2406 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2407 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002408
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002409- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2410 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2411
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002412- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2413 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2414 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002415 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002416 is backward compatible.
2417
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002418- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2419 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2420 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2421 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2422 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2423
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002424- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2425 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2426 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2427 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2428 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2429 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002430
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002431- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2432 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2433
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002434- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2435 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2436
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002437- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2438 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2439 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2440 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2441 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2442
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002443- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2444 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2445 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2446
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002447- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002448 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2449
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002450- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2451 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2452 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002453
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002454- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2455 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2456
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002457- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2458 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2459 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2460
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002461- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2462
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002463Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002464-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002465
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002466- Added three operators to the operator module:
2467 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2468 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2469 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2470
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002471- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2472
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002473- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2474 archives.
2475
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002476- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2477 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2478 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2479
2480 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2481
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002482- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2483 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2484 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002485 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002486
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002487- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2488 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2489 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2490 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002491 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2492 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2493 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2494 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002495
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002496- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2497 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002498
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002499- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2500
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002501- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2502 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2503
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002504- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2505 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2506 supported.
2507
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002508- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2509
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002510- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2511 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002512
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002513- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2514 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2515
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002516- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2517
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002518- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2519 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2520
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002521- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2522 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2523 functions but callable type objects.
2524
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002525- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002526 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002527 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002528
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002529- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2530 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002531
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002532- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2533 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002534
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002535- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2536 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2537 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2538 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2539
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002540- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2541 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002542
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002543- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2544 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2545 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2546 and __imul__.
2547
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002548- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002549 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2550 is called.
2551
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002552- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2553 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2554 interpreter was compiled.
2555
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002556- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2557 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2558 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002559 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002560 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2561 1, not 2.
2562
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002563- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2564 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2565 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2566 limit.
2567
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002568- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2569 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2570 bug #623464.
2571
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002572- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2573 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2574 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2575 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2576
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002577Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002578-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002579
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002580- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2581
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002582- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2583 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2584 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2585 with Python 2.3a2.
2586
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002587- os.path exposes getctime.
2588
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002589- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002590 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002591 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002592 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002593 unit tests of floating point results.
2594
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002595- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2596 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2597 has been increased.
2598
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002599- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2600 executed.
2601
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002602- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2603 postinstallation script.
2604
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002605- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2606 test the current module.
2607
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002608- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002609 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2610 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2611 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2612 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2613
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002614- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002615 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002616 Ward's Optik package.
2617
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002618- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2619 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2620 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2621 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2622
2623- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2624 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002625 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002626
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002627- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2628 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2629 shelf are binary pickles.
2630
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002631- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2632 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2633
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002634- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2635 modules are iterators now.
2636
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002637- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2638 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2639 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2640 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2641 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2642 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002643
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002644- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2645 with their entity value.
2646
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002647- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2648
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002649- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2650 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002651
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002652- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2653 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002654 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002655
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002656- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2657 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2658 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2659 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2660 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2661 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2662 main():
2663
2664 import locale
2665 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2666
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002667- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2668 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2669
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002670- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2671 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2672 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2673 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2674 to the new standard.
2675
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002676- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2677 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2678 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2679 an extension to the database.
2680
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002681- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2682 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2683 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2684 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002685 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002686
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002687- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002688 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002689
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002690- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2691 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2692 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2693 bounded integers.
2694
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002695- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2696 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2697 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2698 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2699 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2700 in existence.
2701
2702 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2703 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2704 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2705 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2706 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2707 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2708
2709 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2710 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2711 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2712 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2713
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002714- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2715 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2716 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2717
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002718- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2719
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002720- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2721 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2722 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2723 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2724
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002725- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2726 argument.
2727
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002728- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2729 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2730 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2731 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2732 [SF patch 560794].
2733
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002734- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2735 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2736 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002737 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2738 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2739 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002740
2741- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2742 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002743
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002744- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2745 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2746 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2747 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002748
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002749- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2750 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2751 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2752 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2753 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2754
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002755- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002756
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002757- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2758
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002759- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2760 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2761 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2762 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2763 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2764 identical to None.
2765
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002766- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2767 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2768 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2769 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2770 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2771 results now.
2772
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002773- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2774 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2775
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002776- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2777 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2778 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2779 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2780 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2781 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2782 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2783 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2784
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002785- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2786
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002787- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2788 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2789
2790- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2791 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2792 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2793 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2794 and other systems.
2795
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002796- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2797 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2798 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2799 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 +00002800 work well with these.
2801
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002802- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2803
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002804- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002805 connections.
2806
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002807- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2808 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2809 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2810
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002811- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2812 sets
2813
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002814- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2815 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2816 name.
2817
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002818- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2819 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2820 passed in.
2821
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002822- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002823 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002824 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2825 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002826
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002827- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2828
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002829- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2830
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002831- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2832 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2833 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2834
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002835- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2836 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2837 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2838 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002839 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002840
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002841- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002842 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002843 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002844
2845- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2846 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2847 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2848
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002849- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002850 the value of its expression argument.
2851
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002852- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2853 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2854 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2855
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002856- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2857 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2858 skipstone browser was included.
2859
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002860- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2861 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2862
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002863Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002864-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002865
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002866- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2867 names in addition to accepting file names.
2868
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002869- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2870 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2871 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2872 still used and useful.)
2873
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002874- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2875 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2876 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2877 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002878
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002879- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2880 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2881 the generated binary.
2882
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002883Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002884-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002885
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002886- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2887
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002888- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2889 except in the hands of experts.
2890
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002891- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002892 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2893 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2894 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002895
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002896- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2897 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2898 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2899 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2900 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2901 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2902 builds.
2903
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002904- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2905 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2906 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2907 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2908 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2909 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2910 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2911 new type.
2912
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002913- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002914
2915 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2916 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2917 positive infinities.
2918
2919 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2920 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2921 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2922 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2923 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2924 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2925 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2926
2927 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2928
2929 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2930
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002931- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2932 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2933 size of the executable.
2934
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002935- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2936 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2937 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2938 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002939
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002940- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2941
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002942- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2943 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2944 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002945
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002946- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2947 well as Unix.
2948
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002949- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2950 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2951 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2952 modules in the README file for details.
2953
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002954C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002955-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002956
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002957- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2958 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002959 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002960 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002961 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002962
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002963- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2964 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2965 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2966 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2967 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2968 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002969 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002970 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2971 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2972 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2973 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2974 aligned.)
2975
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002976- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2977 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2978 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2979
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002980- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2981 level.
2982
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002983- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2984 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2985 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2986 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2987 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2988
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002989- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2990 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2991 code.
2992
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002993- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2994 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2995 adjusting for negative indices.
2996
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002997- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2998 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2999 object.
3000
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003001- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3002 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3003 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3004
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003005- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3006 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003007
3008- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3009
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003010- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3011 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3012 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3013 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3014
3015- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3016
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003017- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003018
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003019- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003020 without going through the buffer API.
3021
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003022- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003023
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003024- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3025 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3026 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3027 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3028
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003029- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3030 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3031
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003032- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003033 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3034
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003035New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003036-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003037
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003038- OpenVMS is now supported.
3039
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003040- AtheOS is now supported.
3041
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003042- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3043
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003044- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3045
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003046Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003047-----
3048
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003049- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3050 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3051 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003052
3053Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003054-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003055
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003056- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3057 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3058 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3059 bugs.
3060 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003061 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003062 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3063 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003064 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003065
3066- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003067 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003068
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003069- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3070 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3071
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003072- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3073 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003074 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003075 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3076
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003077- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3078 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3079 use files" uninstall option).
3080
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003081- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3082
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003083- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3084 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3085
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003086- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3087 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3088 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3089
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003090- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3091 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3092 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3093 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3094 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003095 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3096 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3097 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003098
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003099- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003100 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003101 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3102 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3103 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3104 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3105 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3106 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3107 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3108 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3109 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3110 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3111 work around.
3112
3113- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3114 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3115 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3116 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3117 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3118 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3119 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3120 specified with O_CREAT too).
3121
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003122Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003123----
3124
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003125- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003126
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003127- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3128 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3129 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3130
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003131- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3132 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3133 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3134
3135- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3136 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3137 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3138 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3139 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3140 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3141 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3142 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003143
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003144- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3145 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3146 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003147
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003148- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3149 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3150 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3151 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3152 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003153
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003154- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3155 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3156 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003157
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003158- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3159 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003160
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003161- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3162 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3163 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3164 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3165 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003166
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003167- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3168 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3169 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3170
3171- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3172 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3173 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003174
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003175- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3176 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3177 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3178 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003179 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003180
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003181- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3182 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003183
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003184- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3185 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003186
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003187- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003188 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003189 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3190 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003191
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003192
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003193What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003194===============================
3195
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003196*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3197
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003198Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003199--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003200
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003201- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3202 with a custom metaclass.
3203
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003204Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003205-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003206
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003207- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3208 are proxies.
3209
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003210Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003211-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003212
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003213- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3214 very short strings.
3215
3216- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3217 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3218 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3219 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3220 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3221
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003222Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003223-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003224
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003225- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3226 close or delete time).
3227
3228- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3229 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3230
3231- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3232
3233- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003234 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003235
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003236Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003237-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003238
3239Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003240-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003241
3242C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003243-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003244
3245New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003246-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003247
3248Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003249-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003250
3251Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003252-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003253
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003254- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3255
3256- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3257 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3258
3259- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3260 deleted at process exit time.
3261
3262- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3263 in backslash.
3264
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003265Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003266----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003267
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003268- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3269 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3270 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3271
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003272
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003273What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003274===========================
3275
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003276*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3277
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003278Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003279--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003280
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003281- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3282 been extensively updated. See
3283
3284 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3285
3286 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3287
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003288- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3289 deleted!
3290
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003291- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3292 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3293 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3294 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3295 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3296
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003297- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3298
3299 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3300 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3301
3302 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3303 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3304 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3305 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3306 supported anyway.
3307
3308 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3309 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3310
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003311- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3312 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3313 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3314 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3315 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003316
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003317- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3318 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3319 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3320
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003321Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003322-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003323
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003324- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3325 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3326 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3327 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3328 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3329 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003330 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3331 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3332 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3333 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003334
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003335- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3336 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3337 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3338
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003339Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003340-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003341
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003342- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3343
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003344Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003345-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003346
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003347- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3348 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3349 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3350 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3351 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3352 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3353
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003354- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3355
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003356- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3357
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003358- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3359
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003360- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3361 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3362 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3363
3364- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3365
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003366Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003367-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003368
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003369- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3370 off a search on Google.
3371
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003372Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003373-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003374
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003375- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3376 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3377 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3378 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3379 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3380 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3381 other platforms should do likewise.
3382
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003383- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3384 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3385 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3386
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003387C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003388-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003389
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003390- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3391 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3392 producing key-value pairs.
3393
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003394- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003395 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003396 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3397 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3398 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3399 previously went unchallenged.
3400
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003401New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003402-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003403
3404Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003405-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003406
3407Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003408-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003409
3410Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003411----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003412
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003413- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3414 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003415
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003416- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3417 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3418 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3419 home.
3420
3421
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003422What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003423===========================
3424
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003425*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3426
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003427Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003428--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003429
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003430- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3431 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003432
3433 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003434 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003435
3436 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3437 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003438 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003439 This needs to be documented.
3440
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003441- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3442 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3443
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003444- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3445 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3446 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3447
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003448- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3449 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3450
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003451- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3452 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3453 class forbids it).
3454
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003455- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3456 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3457 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3458
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003459- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3460
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003461Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003462-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003463
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003464- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3465 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003466 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003467
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003468- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3469 (like 1 + '').
3470
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003471Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003472-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003473
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003474- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3475 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3476 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3477 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003478 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003479 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3480
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003481- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3482 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3483 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3484 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3485
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003486- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3487 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003488 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3489 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3490 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003491
3492- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3493 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003494
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003495- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3496 bytes on its input.
3497
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003498Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003499-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003500
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003501- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003502 convenience function.
3503
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003504- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3505 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3506 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003507 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3508 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3509 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3510 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3511 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3512 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003513
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003514- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3515 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3516 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3517 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3518
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003519- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3520 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3521 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3522
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003523- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3524 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3525 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3526 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3527
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003528- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3529 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003530 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003531 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3532 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3533 new -l and -e options.
3534
3535- statcache is now deprecated.
3536
3537- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3538 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003539 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003540 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3541 time properly taken into account.
3542
3543- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3544 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3545 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3546 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3547
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003548Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003549-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003550
3551Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003553
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003554- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3555 is built with libdb3 if available.
3556
3557- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3558
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003559C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003560-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003561
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003562- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3563 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3564 PySequence_Size().
3565
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003566- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3567
3568- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3569 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3570 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3571
3572- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3573 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3574
3575- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3576 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3577
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003578New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003579-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003580
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003581- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3582 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3583
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003584- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3585 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3586
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003587- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3588
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003589Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003590-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003591
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003592- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3593 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3594
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003595Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003596-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003597
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003598Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003599----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003600
3601- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3602 removed completely in the next release.
3603
3604- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3605 OSX.
3606
3607- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3608 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3609
3610- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3611
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003612
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003613What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003614===========================
3615
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003616*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3617
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003618Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003619--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003620
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003621- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003622 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003623 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003624 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3625 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003626 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3627 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003628 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3629 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003630
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003631- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3632 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3633
3634- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3635 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3636
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003637Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003638-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003639
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003640- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3641 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3642 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3643 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3644 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3645 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3646 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3647 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3648
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003649- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3650 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3651 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3652 example).
3653
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003654- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003655 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003656 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003657 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003658
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003659- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3660 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3661 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003662 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003663
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003664- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3665 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3666 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3667 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3668 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3669 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3670
3671 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3672
3673 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3674
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003675Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003676-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003677
3678- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3679
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003680- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3681
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003682- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3683 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003684
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003685- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3686 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3687 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3688 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3689 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3690 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003691 attributes.
3692
3693- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3694 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3695 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003696
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003697- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3698 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3699 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003700
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003701- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3702 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3703 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003704 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3705 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3706
3707- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3708 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003709
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003710Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003711-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003712
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003713- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3714 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3715
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003716- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3717 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3718 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3719 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3720
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003721- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3722 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3723 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3724 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3725
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003726 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3727 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3728 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3729 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3730 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3731 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3732 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3733 without losing information).
3734
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003735- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003736 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3737 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3738 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3739 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3740 module).
3741
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003742 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003743 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3744 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3745 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3746 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003747
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003748- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003749 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3750 encoding.
3751
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003752- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3753 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3754
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003755- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003756 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3757
3758- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3759 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3760 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3761 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3762
3763- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3764
3765- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3766 ON, and OFF.
3767
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003768- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3769 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3770
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003771Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003772-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003773
3774- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3775 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3776 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003777
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003778- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3779 been added: -X and -E.
3780
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003781Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003782-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003783
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003784- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3785 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3786
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003787C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003788-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003789
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003790- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3791 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3792 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3793 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3794 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3795
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003796- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3797 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3798 as long) arguments.
3799
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003800- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3801 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3802 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3803 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3804 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3805 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3806
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003807- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3808 input.
3809
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003810New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003811-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003812
3813Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003814-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003815
3816Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003817-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003818
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003819- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3820 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3821 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3822
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003823- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3824 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3825 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003826 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003827
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003828 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3829 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3830 import signal
3831 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003832
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003833 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003834 while 1:
3835 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003836 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003837 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3838 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3839 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3840 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003841
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003842
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003843What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3844===========================
3845
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003846*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3847
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003848Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003849--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003850
3851- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3852 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3853 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3854
3855- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3856 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3857 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3858 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3859 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3860 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3861 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003862
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003863- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003864 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003865 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3866 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3867 associate a docstring with a property.
3868
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003869- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3870 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3871 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3872 other built-in object types.
3873
3874- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3875 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3876 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3877 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3878 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3879
3880- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3881 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3882
3883- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3884 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003885 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003886 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3887 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3888 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3889 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3890 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3891
3892- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3893 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3894 class.
3895
3896- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3897 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3898 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3899 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3900
3901- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3902 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3903 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3904 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3905
3906- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3907 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3908
3909- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3910 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3911 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3912 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3913 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003914 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003915 with the same value as s.
3916
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003917- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3918
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003919Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003920----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003921
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003922- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3923
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003924- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3925 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3926 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3927 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3928 objects.
3929
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003930- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3931 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003932 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3933 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3934
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003935- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3936 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3937 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3938
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003939Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003940-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003941
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003942- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3943 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3944 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3945 by the instances.
3946
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003947- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3948 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3949 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3950
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003951- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3952 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3953 before the entire comparison is complete.
3954
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003955- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3956 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3957 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3958
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003959- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3960 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3961 getwriter().
3962
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003963- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3964 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3965
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003966- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003967 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3968 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3969
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003970- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3971 iterable object.
3972
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003973- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3974 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003975
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003976- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3977 authentication.
3978
3979- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3980 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003981
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003982- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003983 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3984 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3985 a sample driver.)
3986
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003987Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003988-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003989
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003990- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3991 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3992 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3993 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3994 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3995 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3996 kernel has large file support.
3997
3998- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3999 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4000 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4001 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4002 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4003
4004- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4005 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4006 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4007
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004008C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004009-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004010
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004011- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4012 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4013
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004014New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004015-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004016
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004017- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4018 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4019
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004020Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004021-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004022
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004023- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4024 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4025 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4026 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4027 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4028
4029- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4030 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4031 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4032 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4033
4034- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4035 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4036
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004037Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004038-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004039
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004040- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004041 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4042 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004043
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004044
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004045What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4046===========================
4047
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004048*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4049
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004050Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004051----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004052
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004053- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4054 big to represent as a C double.
4055
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004056- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4057 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4058 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4059 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4060 restriction).
4061
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004062- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4063 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4064 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4065 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4066 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4067
4068 >>> dir([])
4069 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4070 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4071 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4072 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4073 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4074 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4075 'reverse', 'sort']
4076
4077 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4078
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004079- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004080 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4081 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4082 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4083 OverflowError exception.
4084
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004085- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004086 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004087 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4088 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4089 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4090 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4091 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004092 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004093 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4094 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4095
4096 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4097 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4098 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4099 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004100
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004101- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004102 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4103 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4104 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4105 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4106 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4107 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4108 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4109 once it is created.
4110
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004111- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4112 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4113 (key, value) pairs.
4114
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004115- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004116 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4117 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4118
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004119- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4120 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4121 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4122 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4123 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004124
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004125- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004126 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4127 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4128
4129 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4130
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004131- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004132 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4133
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004134Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004135-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004136
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004137- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004138 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4139 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004140
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004141- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4142 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4143 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4144 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4145 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4146 in this area anymore).
4147
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004148- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4149 threading.Timer.
4150
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004151- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4152 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4153
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004154- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004155 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4156
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004157- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004158 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4159 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4160 converted to Python longs.
4161
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004162- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004163 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4164
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004165- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4166 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4167 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4168
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004169Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004170-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004171
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004172- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4173 division operators as per PEP 238.
4174
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004175Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004176-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004177
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004178- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4179 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4180 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4181 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4182
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004183C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004184-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004185
4186- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004187
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004188- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4189 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004190 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004191
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004192 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4193 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004194 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004195 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004196
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004197- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004198 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4199 module:
4200
4201 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004202
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004203 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4204 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004205
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004206 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4207 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004208
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004209 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4210
4211 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4212
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004213- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004214 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4215 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4216 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004217
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004218New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004219-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004220
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004221- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4222 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4223 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4224 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4225 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004226
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004227Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004228-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004229
4230Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004231-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004232
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004233- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4234 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4235 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4236 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004237 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4238 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4239 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4240 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4241 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004242
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004243- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004244 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4245
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004246
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004247What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4248===========================
4249
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004250*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4251
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004252Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004253-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004254
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004255- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4256 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4257
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004258- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4259 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4260 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004261
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004262- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4263 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4264 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4265 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004266
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004267- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4268
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004269- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004270
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004271Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004272-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004273
4274- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004275 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004276 the module docstring for details.
4277
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004278Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004280
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004281- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004282 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4283 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4284 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004285
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004286- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4287 Nick Mathewson.
4288
4289Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004290----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004291
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004292- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4293 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4294 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4295 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4296 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4297 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4298 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4299 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4300
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004301- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4302 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4303 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4304 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4305
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004306- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4307 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4308 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4309 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4310 come a long way).
4311
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004312- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4313 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4314 write filters for these warnings).
4315
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004316- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4317 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4318 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4319 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4320 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4321
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004322- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4323 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4324 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4325 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4326 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4327 older distribution.
4328
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004329Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004330-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004331
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004332- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4333 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004334 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004335
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004336- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4337 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4338 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4339
4340- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4341
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004342- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4343
4344- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4345
4346- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4347
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004348- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004349
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004350- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4351
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004352New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004354
4355C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004356-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004357
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004358- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4359 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4360 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4361 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4362 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4363 against buffer overruns.
4364
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004365- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004366 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4367 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004368 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4369 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4370 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4371
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004372- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4373 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4374 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4375 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4376 deprecated.
4377
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004378Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004379-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004380
4381- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4382 relevant is found.
4383
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004384
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004385What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004386===========================
4387
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004388*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4389
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004390Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004391----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004392
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004393- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4394 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4395 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4396 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4397 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4398 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4399 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4400 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004401 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004402 repaired.
4403
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004404- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004405 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004406 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4407 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4408 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4409 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4410 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4411 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4412 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4413 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4414
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004415- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4416 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4417 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4418 leading BMO character).
4419
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004420- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4421 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4422 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4423
4424 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4425 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4426 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004427
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004428 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4429 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4430 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4431 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4432 for various simple to use conversions.
4433
4434 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4435 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4436
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004437 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4438 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4439 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4440 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4441 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4442 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4443 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4444 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4445 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4446 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4447 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4448 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4449 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4450 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4451 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004452
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004453- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4454 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4455 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004456 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004457 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004458
4459 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004460 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4461 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4462 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4463 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4464 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004465 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4466 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004467
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004468 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4469 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4470 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004471 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004472
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004473- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4474 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4475 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4476 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4477 floating arithmetic,
4478
4479 x = 9007199254740992.0
4480 print long(x)
4481
4482 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4483 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4484 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4485 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4486 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4487 functions are of good quality).
4488
4489 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4490 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4491 algorithms to break.
4492
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004493- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4494 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4495 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4496 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4497 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4498 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4499 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4500 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4501 order.
4502
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004503- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4504 operation along the most common code paths.
4505
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004506- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4507 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4508
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004509- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4510 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4511 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4512 {}.update(UserDict())
4513
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004514- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4515 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4516 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4517 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4518 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4519 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4520 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4521 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4522
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004523- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004524 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004525
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004526 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004527 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4528 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004529 join() method of strings
4530 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004531 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4532 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004533 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004534 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004535
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004536- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4537 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4538
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004539- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4540 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4541
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004542- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4543 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4544 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4545 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4546
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004547- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4548 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004549 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004550 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4551 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004552
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004553- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4554
4555
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004556Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004557-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004558
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004559- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004560 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004561 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4562 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4563
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004564- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4565 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4566
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004567- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4568 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4569 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4570 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4571
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004572- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4573 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4574 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4575
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004576- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4577
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004578- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4579
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004580- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4581 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4582 that are still imported into string.py).
4583
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004584- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4585
4586- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4587 Now it does.
4588
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004589- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4590
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004591- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4592 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4593 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4594 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4595 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004596 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4597 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004598
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004599- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4600 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4601 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4602 'help(object)'.
4603
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004604Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004605-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004606
4607- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004608 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004609 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4610 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4611
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004612- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004613 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4614 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004615
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004616C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004617-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004618
4619- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4620 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004621
4622----
4623
4624**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**