blob: 89583e094c58f1e137b5d02773fd9bef5fd792ff [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000015- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
16 reference counts in some error exit cases.
17
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000018- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
19 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
20 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
21 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
22 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
23 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
24 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
25 realloc.
26
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000027- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
28 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
29
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000030- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
31 like their int counterparts.
32
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000033- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
34 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
35 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
36 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
37 for a longer write-up of the problem).
38
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000039- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
40 serializing floats.
41
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000042- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
43 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
44 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
45
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000046- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
47 278.
48
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000049- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
50 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
51 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
52 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
53 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
54 PyNumber_*().
55 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
56
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000057- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
58 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
59 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
60 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
61
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000062- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
63 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
64 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
65 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
66 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
67
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000068- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
69 disabled caused a crash.
70
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000071- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
72 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
73
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000074- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000075 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
76
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000077- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
78
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000079- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000080 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
81 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
82 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000083
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000084- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
85
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000086- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
87 returning None.
88
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000089- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000090 ('\') with a specific error message.
91
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000092- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
93
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000094- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
95 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
96
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000097- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000098 an ferror() call.
99
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000100- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
101 list.sort().
102
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000103- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
104 (2+3) --> (5).
105
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000106- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
107
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000108- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
109 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000110
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000111- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
112 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
113 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
114
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000115Extension Modules
116-----------------
117
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000118- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000119 implemented treated all integer values except 1 as false.
120
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000121- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
122
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000123- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
124 if available on the platform.
125
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000126- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
127 available on the platform.
128
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000129- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
130 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
131
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000132- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
133
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000134- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
135 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
136 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
137
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000138- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
139
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000140- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
141 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
142
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000143- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000144 file size.
145
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000146- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
147
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000148- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
149 {remove_history,replace_history}
150
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000151- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
152 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000153
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000154- stat_float_times is now True.
155
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000156- array.array objects are now picklable.
157
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000158- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
159 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
160
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000161- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
162 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
163 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
164
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000165- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
166 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000167
168Library
169-------
170
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000171- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
172 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
173
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000174- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
175 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
176
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000177- textwrap now processes text chucks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
178 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
179
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000180- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
181 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
182
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000183- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
184 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
185
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000186- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
187 though this can be missing in embedded interpreters
188
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000189- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
190
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000191- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
192 error messages.
193
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000194- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
195
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000196- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
197 Bug #1224621.
198
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000199- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
200 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
201 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
202 terminates by raising StopIteration.
203
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000204- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
205
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000206- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
207 component of the path.
208
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000209- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
210 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
211 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
212 class at all.
213
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000214- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
215 files to PyPI.
216
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000217- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
218 them to PyPI.
219
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000220- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
221 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
222 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
223 work as expected.
224
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000225- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
226 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
227
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000228- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000229 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
230
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000231- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
232
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000233- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
234 to build.
235
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000236- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
237 symbolic links on Windows.
238
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000239- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000240 profile.py if available.
241
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000242- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
243
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000244- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
245 in LWPCookieJar.
246
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000247- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
248
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000249- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
250
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000251- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
252
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000253- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
254
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000255- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
256
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000257- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
258
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000259- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
260
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000261- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
262
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000263- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
264 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
265 be exploited in various ways.
266
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000267- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
268
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000269- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
270
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000271- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
272
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000273- Enhancements to the csv module:
274
275 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
276 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000277 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000278 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
279 reporting.
280 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
281 dictates.
282 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000283 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000284 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000285 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
286 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000287 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
288 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000289 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000290 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
291 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
292 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
293 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
294 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
295 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
296 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
297 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
298 without first creating a dialect class.
299 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
300 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
301 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000302 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000303 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
304 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000305 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
306 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
307 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
308 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000309 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
310 This has been fixed.
311
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000312- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
313 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
314 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
315 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
316
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000317- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
318
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000319- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
320 (Bug #951915).
321
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000322- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
323 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
324 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
325 encoding alias table
326
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000327- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
328
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000329- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
330 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
331
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000332- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
333
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000334- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
335
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000336- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
337
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000338- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
339
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000340- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
341
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000342- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
343 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
344 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
345
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000346- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000347 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000348
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000349- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
350 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
351 tokenizer with very long source lines.
352
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000353- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
354 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
355
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000356- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
357 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000358
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000359- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
360 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
361
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000362- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
363 correctly.
364
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000365- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
366 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
367 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
368 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
369 between two lines.
370
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000371
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000372Build
373-----
374
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000375- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
376 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
377 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000378 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000379
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000380- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
381 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
382 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
383
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000384- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
385
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000386- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
387 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
388
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000389- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
390 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
391 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
392 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
393 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
394 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
395 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
396 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
397
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000398- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
399 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
400 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
401 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
402
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000403
404C API
405-----
406
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000407- Removed PyRange_New().
408
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000409
410Tests
411-----
412
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000413- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000414
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000415
416Documentation
417-------------
418
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000419- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
420
421- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
422
423- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
424
425- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
426
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000427- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
428 Closes bug #1166582.
429
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000430- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
431 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
432 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
433
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000434Mac
435---
436
437
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000438New platforms
439-------------
440
441- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
442
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000443
444Tools/Demos
445-----------
446
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000447- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
448
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000449- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000450
451
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000452What's New in Python 2.4 final?
453===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000454
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000455*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000456
457Core and builtins
458-----------------
459
460- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
461 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
462 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
463
464
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000465What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
466==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000467
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000468*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000469
470Core and builtins
471-----------------
472
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000473- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
474 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
475 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
476
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000477
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000478Library
479-------
480
481- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
482 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
483 raised is re-raised.
484
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000485- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
486 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
487
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000488- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
489 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
490 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
491 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
492 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
493 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
494 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
495 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
496 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
497 by the slice are recomputed now.
498
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000499- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000500
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000501Build
502-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000503
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000504- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
505 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
506 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000507
508C API
509-----
510
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000511- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
512
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000513
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000514What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
515================================
516
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000517*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000518
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000519License
520-------
521
522The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
523is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
524changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
525Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
526intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
527durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
528the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
529License::
530
531 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
532
533says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
534to Python 2.1.1.
535
536The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
537License Version 2.
538
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000539Core and builtins
540-----------------
541
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000542- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
543 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
544 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
545 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
546 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
547 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
548 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
549 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
550 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
551 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
552
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000553- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000554
555Extension Modules
556-----------------
557
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000558- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
559 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
560 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
561 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000562
563Library
564-------
565
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000566- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
567 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
568 returned.
569
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000570- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
571
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000572- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
573 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
574
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000575- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
576
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000577- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
578 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000579
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000580- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
581
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000582- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
583
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000584- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000585 the source code is updated and reloaded.
586
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000587Build
588-----
589
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000590- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000591
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000592What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
593================================
594
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000595*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000596
597Core and builtins
598-----------------
599
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000600- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000601 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
602
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000603- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
604 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
605 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
606 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
607
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000608- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
609 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
610
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000611- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
612 constant.
613
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000614- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
615 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
616 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
617 large), and to anomalies such as
618 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
619 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
620 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
621 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000622
623Extension modules
624-----------------
625
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000626- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
627 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000628 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
629 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
630 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000631
632Library
633-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000634
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000635- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000636 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000637 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
638 --swig-cpp.
639
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000640- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
641 it is set.
642
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000643- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000644
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000645- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
646 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
647 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
648 Closes bug #1039270.
649
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000650- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000651
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000652 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000653 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
654 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
655 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
656 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
657 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
658 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
659 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
660 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
661 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
662 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
663 + Updates to documentation.
664
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000665- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
666 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
667 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
668 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
669
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000670- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000671
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000672- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
673 applications should use the getmember function.
674
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000675- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
676
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000677- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
678 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
679 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
680 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
681 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
682 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
683 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
684 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
685 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
686
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000687- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
688 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000689 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000690
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000691- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
692 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
693 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
694 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
695 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
696 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
697 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
698 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000699
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000700- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
701 the new public features (of which there are many).
702
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000703- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000704 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
705 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
706 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
707 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000708 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000709
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000710- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
711
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000712- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
713 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
714 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
715 options.
716
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000717- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
718 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
719 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
720 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
721 conditions under which non-string values work.
722
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000723Build
724-----
725
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000726- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
727 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
728 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
729
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000730- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
731 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
732 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
733 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
734 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000735
736C API
737-----
738
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000739- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
740 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
741
742- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
743
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000744- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
745 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
746 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
747 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
748 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
749 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
750 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
751 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
752 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
753
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000754- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
755
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000756- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
757 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
758 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000759
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000760Tests
761-----
762
763- test__locale ported to unittest
764
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000765Mac
766---
767
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000768- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
769 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
770 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000771
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000772Tools/Demos
773-----------
774
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000775- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
776 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
777 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
778 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
779 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000780
781
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000782What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
783=================================
784
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000785*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000786
787Core and builtins
788-----------------
789
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000790- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000791 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
792
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000793- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
794 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
795 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
796 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
797 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
798 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
799 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
800 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000801 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
802 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
803 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
804 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
805 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000806
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000807- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
808 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
809 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
810 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
811 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
812
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000813- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
814
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000815- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
816 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
817
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000818- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
819 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
820 modified the list.
821
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000822- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
823 functions is now writable.
824
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000825- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
826 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
827 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
828 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
829
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000830- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
831 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
832 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
833 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
834 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000835
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000836- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
837 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
838
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000839Extension modules
840-----------------
841
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000842- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
843
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000844- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
845 data.
846
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000847- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
848 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
849 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
850 supposed to have been truncated away.
851
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000852- Added socket.socketpair().
853
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000854- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
855 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
856
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000857- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000858 versions of Python, have now been removed.
859
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000860Library
861-------
862
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000863- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000864 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000865
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000866- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
867 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
868
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000869- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
870 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
871
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000872- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
873
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000874- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
875 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000876
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000877- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
878 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
879
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000880- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
881
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000882- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
883
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000884- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
885
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000886- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
887 Percivall.
888
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000889- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
890 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
891
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000892- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
893 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
894 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000895 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000896
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000897- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
898 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
899 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
900 and exponent.
901
902- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
903
904- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
905 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
906 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
907
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000908- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
909 to the readline module.
910
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000911- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000912 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
913 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000914
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000915- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
916 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
917 contains symlinks.
918
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000919- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
920 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
921
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000922- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
923 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
924 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
925
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000926- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
927 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
928 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
929 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
930 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
931 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
932 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
933 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
934 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
935 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
936 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
937 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
938 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
939
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000940- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
941
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000942Tools/Demos
943-----------
944
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000945- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
946 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
947
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000948- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
949
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000950Build
951-----
952
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000953- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
954 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
955 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
956 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
957 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
958 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
959 plans to do so.
960
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000961- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
962 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
963
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000964- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
965 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
966
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000967- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
968 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
969
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000970- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
971 GNU/k*BSD systems.
972
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000973- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
974 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
975
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000976C API
977-----
978
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000979..
980
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000981Documentation
982-------------
983
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000984- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
985 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
986
987- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
988 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
989 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000990
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000991New platforms
992-------------
993
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000994- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
995
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000996Tests
997-----
998
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000999..
1000
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001001Windows
1002-------
1003
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001004- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1005 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1006 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1007 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1008 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1009 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1010 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1011 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1012 the problem.
1013
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001014Mac
1015---
1016
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001017..
1018
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001019
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001020What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1021=================================
1022
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001023*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001024
1025Core and builtins
1026-----------------
1027
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001028- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1029 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1030 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1031 sensitive code.
1032
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001033- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001034 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001035
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001036 @staticmethod
1037 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001038
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001039 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001040
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001041- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1042 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1043 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1044 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1045 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1046 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1047 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1048 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1049 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1050 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1051 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1052
1053 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1054 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1055 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1056 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1057 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1058 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1059 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1060
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001061- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1062 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1063
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001064- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001065 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001066
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001067- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001068 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001069 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1070
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001071- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001072 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1073 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1074
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001075- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1076 types that support garbage collection.
1077
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001078- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1079
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001080- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1081 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1082 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1083 Jython.
1084
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001085- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1086
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001087- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1088 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1089
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001090- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1091 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1092 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001093
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001094- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1095 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1096 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1097
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001098Extension modules
1099-----------------
1100
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001101- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1102
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001103Library
1104-------
1105
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001106- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1107 TIS-620
1108
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001109- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1110 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1111 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1112 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1113 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1114 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1115 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1116 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1117 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1118 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1119
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001120- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1121
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001122- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1123 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1124 same as when the argument is omitted).
1125 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1126
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001127- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1128
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001129- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1130 schemes are offered.
1131
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001132- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1133
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001134- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1135 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1136 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1137
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001138- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1139
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001140- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1141 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1142
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001143- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1144 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1145 when dummy_threading is being used.
1146
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001147- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1148 from a tarfile.
1149
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001150- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001151 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001152
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001153- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1154 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1155 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1156 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1157
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001158- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1159 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1160
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001161- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1162 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1163 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1164 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1165 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1166 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1167 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1168 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1169 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1170 by some other method in progress).
1171
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001172- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1173 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1174 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001175
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001176- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1177
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001178- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1179 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1180 AM Kuchling.
1181
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001182- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1183 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1184 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1185
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001186- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1187 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1188 instead of unsigned.
1189
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001190- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001191 no longer part of the public API.
1192
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001193- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1194 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1195 string methods of the same name).
1196
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001197- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001198 SF patch 945642.
1199
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001200- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1201
1202 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1203
1204 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1205 DocTestSuites.
1206
1207- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1208 that provide thread-local data.
1209
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001210- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1211 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1212
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001213- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1214
1215- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1216 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1217 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1218
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001219- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1220
1221 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1222 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1223 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001224
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001225 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1226 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1227 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1228 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1229
1230 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1231 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1232
1233 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1234 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1235 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1236 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1237
1238 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1239 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1240 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1241 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1242 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1243
1244 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1245 wrapping help output.
1246
1247 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1248 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1249 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001250
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001251C API
1252-----
1253
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001254- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1255 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1256 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1257 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1258 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1259 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1260 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1261 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1262 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1263 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1264 its visible semantics have not changed.
1265
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001266- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1267 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1268
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001269Documentation
1270-------------
1271
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001272- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001273
1274 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001275 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001276
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001277 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001278
1279 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1280
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001281- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001282
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001283Tests
1284-----
1285
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001286- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001287 platforms that use the Makefile.
1288
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001289- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1290 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1291 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1292
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001293
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001294What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1295=================================
1296
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001297*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001298
1299Core and builtins
1300-----------------
1301
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001302- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1303 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1304 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1305 objects now (one object instead of three).
1306
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001307- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1308 Windows DLLs.
1309
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001310- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1311 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001312
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001313- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1314 a new .pyc magic.
1315
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001316- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1317 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1318 be there.
1319
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001320- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1321 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1322 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1323
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001324- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1325 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1326 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1327
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001328- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1329
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001330- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1331 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1332 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001333
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001334- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1335 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1336
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001337- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1338
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001339- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001340 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001341
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001342- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1343
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001344- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1345
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001346- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1347 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1348
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001349- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1350 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1351 Fixes bug #858016 .
1352
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001353- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1354 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1355 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1356
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001357- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1358 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1359 improves their performance (about 35%).
1360
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001361- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1362 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1363 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1364
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001365- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1366 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1367 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1368 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1369
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001370- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1371 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001372 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001373 length is not known).
1374
1375- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1376 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001377 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1378 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001379 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1380
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001381- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1382 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1383
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001384- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1385 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1386 keyword arguments.
1387
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001388- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1389 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1390 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1391
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001392- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1393 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1394 cases.
1395
1396- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1397 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1398 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1399 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1400 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1401 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1402 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1403 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1404 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1405 a release build.
1406
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001407- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1408 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1409
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001410- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001411 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001412
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001413- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1414 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1415 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1416 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1417 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1418 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1419 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1420 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1421 destroyed.
1422
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001423- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1424 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1425 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1426 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1427 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1428 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1429 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1430 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1431
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001432- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1433 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1434 character other than a space.
1435
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001436- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1437 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1438 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1439 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1440 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1441 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1442 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1443 attributes with the same name.
1444
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001445- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1446 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1447 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1448 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1449 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1450 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1451 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1452 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1453 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1454 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1455 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1456 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1457 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1458 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001459
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001460- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1461 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1462 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1463 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1464 This has been repaired.
1465
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001466- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1467
1468- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1469
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001470- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1471 over a sequence.
1472
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001473- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001474 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001475
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001476- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1477
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001478- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1479 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1480 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1481 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1482 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1483 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1484 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1485 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1486
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001487- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1488 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1489 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1490
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001491- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1492 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1493 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1494 freelist.
1495
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001496- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1497 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1498
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001499- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1500 number.
1501
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001502- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1503 a TypeError exception.
1504
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001505- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1506 820195.
1507
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001508- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1509 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1510 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1511
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001512- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001513 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1514 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001515
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001516- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1517 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1518 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1519
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001520- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1521 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001522 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001523
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001524- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001525 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1526 the first call.
1527
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001528
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001529Extension modules
1530-----------------
1531
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001532- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1533 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1534
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001535- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1536 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1537 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1538 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1539 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1540 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1541 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001542
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001543- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1544
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001545- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1546
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001547- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1548 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1549
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001550- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1551 fewer false positives.
1552
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001553- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1554 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1555
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001556- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001557 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1558
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001559- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001560 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001561 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001562 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1563 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001564
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001565- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1566 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1567 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1568 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1569
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001570- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1571 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1572 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1573 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1574 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1575 #897625.
1576
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001577- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1578 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1579
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001580- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1581 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1582 and pops on either side of the deque.
1583
1584- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1585 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1586
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001587- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1588 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1589 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1590 other functions that expect a function argument.
1591
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001592- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1593
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001594- os.getsid was added.
1595
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001596- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1597 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1598 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1599
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001600- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1601
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001602- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1603
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001604- readline.clear_history was added.
1605
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001606- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1607
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001608- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1609
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001610- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1611
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001612- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1613
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001614- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1615
1616- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1617
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001618- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1619
1620- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1621
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001622- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1623 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1624 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1625
1626- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1627 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1628 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1629 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1630 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1631 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1632 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1633
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001634- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1635 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1636 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1637 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001638
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001639- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001640 iterators from a single iterable.
1641
1642- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1643 of raising a TypeError exception.
1644
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001645- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1646 as parameter.
1647
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001648Library
1649-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001650
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001651- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1652 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1653 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001654
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001655- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1656 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1657 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001658
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001659- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001660
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001661- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1662 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001663
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001664- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1665 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1666
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001667- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1668
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001669- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001670 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001671
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001672- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001673 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001674
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001675- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1676
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001677- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1678 on cygwin and mingw32.
1679
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001680- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1681
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001682- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1683 module.
1684
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001685- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1686 installation scheme for all platforms.
1687
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001688- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001689 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001690
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001691- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1692 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1693 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1694
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001695- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1696 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1697 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1698
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001699- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1700
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001701- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1702
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001703- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1704 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1705
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001706- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1707 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1708 type pattern with the same value exists.
1709
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001710- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1711 when run from the command prompt).
1712
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001713- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1714 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1715
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001716- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1717 default sort).
1718
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001719- Added global runctx function to profile module
1720
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001721- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1722
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001723- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1724
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001725- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1726
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001727- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001728 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1729 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1730 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1731 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1732 accordingly.
1733
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001734- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1735 decoding standards.
1736
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001737- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1738 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1739 called for all requests.
1740
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001741- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1742 they are passed to the compiler.
1743
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001744- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1745 indent, width and depth.
1746
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001747- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1748 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1749
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001750- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1751 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1752
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001753- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1754
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001755- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1756
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001757- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1758
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001759- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1760 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1761
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001762- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001763 for better performance.
1764
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001765- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001766
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001767- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1768 a string).
1769
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001770- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1771
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001772- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1773
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001774- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1775
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001776- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1777
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001778- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1779 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1780 list of fieldnames.
1781
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001782- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1783 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1784
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001785- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1786
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001787- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1788 empty lists.
1789
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001790- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1791 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1792 and shelves.
1793
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001794- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1795 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1796
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001797- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001798 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1799 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001800
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001801- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1802 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001803 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001804
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001805- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001806 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1807 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1808
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001809- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1810 and removed in Py2.4.
1811
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001812- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1813
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001814- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1815
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001816Tools/Demos
1817-----------
1818
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001819- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1820 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1821
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001822- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1823
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001824- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1825 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1826 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1827 destination in situations where both files are given.
1828
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001829- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1830 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1831 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1832 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1833
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001834- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1835
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001836- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1837 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1838 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1839 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1840 now.
1841
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001842- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1843 in effect
1844
1845- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1846 C-c C-h
1847
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001848- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1849 -d option was given.
1850
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001851Build
1852-----
1853
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001854- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1855 build under OS X.
1856
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001857- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1858 --enable-profiling.
1859
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001860- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1861 is configured --with-tsc.
1862
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001863- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1864 on AMD64.
1865
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001866- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1867 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1868
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001869- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1870 removed.
1871
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001872- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1873 supported (see PEP 11).
1874
1875- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1876
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001877- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1878
1879- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1880 (see PEP 11).
1881
1882- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1883 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1884
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001885C API
1886-----
1887
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001888- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1889 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1890 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1891
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001892- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1893 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1894 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1895 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1896
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001897- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1898 generator objects.
1899
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001900- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1901 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001902 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1903 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001904
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001905- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1906 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1907
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001908- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1909 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1910 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1911 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1912 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1913
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001914- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1915 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1916 about 10% faster.
1917
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001918- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1919 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1920
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001921- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1922 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1923 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1924 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1925
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001926Windows
1927-------
1928
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001929- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1930 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1931 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1932 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1933
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001934- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1935 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1936 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1937
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001938
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001939What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1940===============================
1941
1942*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1943
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001944IDLE
1945----
1946
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001947- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1948 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1949 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1950 context-menu actions.
1951
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001952- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1953 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1954 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1955 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1956 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1957 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1958 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1959 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1960 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1961
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001962
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001963What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1964=============================================
1965
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001966*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001967
1968Core and builtins
1969-----------------
1970
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001971- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001972 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001973 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1974
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001975Extension modules
1976-----------------
1977
1978- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1979 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1980 than once. This has been fixed.
1981
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001982- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1983 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1984 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1985 call.
1986
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001987- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1988
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001989Library
1990-------
1991
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001992- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1993 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1994
1995- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1996 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1997 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1998 restored.
1999
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002000IDLE
2001----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002002
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002003- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002004
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002005Build
2006-----
2007
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002008- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2009 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2010
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002011C API
2012-----
2013
2014Windows
2015-------
2016
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002017- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2018 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2019
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002020- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2021
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002022Mac
2023---
2024
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002025- Various fixes to pimp.
2026
2027- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2028
2029- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2030 more problems than it solves.
2031
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002032
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002033What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2034=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002035
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002036*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2037
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002038Core and builtins
2039-----------------
2040
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002041- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2042 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2043
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002044- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2045 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002046 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002047
2048- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2049 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2050 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002051 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002052
2053- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2054 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002055
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002056- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2057 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2058 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2059
2060- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002061 770247.
2062
2063- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002064
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002065Extension modules
2066-----------------
2067
2068- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2069 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2070
2071- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2072
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002073- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2074
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002075- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2076 contained within the _strptime module.
2077
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002078- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2079 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2080
2081- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002082 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2083
2084- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2085 the find_class attribute, if present.
2086
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002087- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002088
2089 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2090 (SF bug 763298).
2091
2092 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002093 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2094 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2095 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002096
2097 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2098
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002099Library
2100-------
2101
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002102- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2103
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002104- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2105 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2106 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2107 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2108 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2109 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2110 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2111 or Tester().
2112
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002113- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2114 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2115 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2116 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2117 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2118 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2119 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2120 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2121 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002122
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002123 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002124
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002125- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2126 weren't before was an oversight.
2127
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002128- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2129 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2130
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002131- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2132 when there are no lines.
2133
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002134- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2135 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2136
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002137- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2138 to child processes.
2139
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002140- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2141
2142- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2143
2144- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2145 xmlrpclib.
2146
2147- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2148 responses.
2149
2150- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2151 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2152
2153- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2154 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2155 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2156
2157- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2158 used as patterns.
2159
2160- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2161 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2162 than Tk 8.3.
2163
2164- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2165
2166- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002167
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002168Tools/Demos
2169-----------
2170
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002171- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2172
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002173- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2174
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002175- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002176
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002177Build
2178-----
2179
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002180- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2181
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002182- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2183
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002184- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2185 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002186
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002187- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2188 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2189 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002190
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002191C API
2192-----
2193
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002194- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2195 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2196
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002197Windows
2198-------
2199
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002200- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2201 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2202 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2203 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2204 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2205 Python exception ::
2206
2207 thread.error: can't start new thread
2208
2209 is raised now.
2210
2211- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2212 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2213 instead of from DLL teardown.
2214
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002215Mac
2216---
2217
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002218- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002219 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002220 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2221 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2222 the executable in the bundle.
2223
2224- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002225
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002226- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2227
2228- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2229 on Panther.
2230
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002231What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2232================================
2233
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002234*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002235
2236Core and builtins
2237-----------------
2238
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002239- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2240 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2241 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2242 with the -i option.
2243
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002244- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2245 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2246
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002247- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2248 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2249
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002250- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2251 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2252 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2253 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2254 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2255 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2256 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2257 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2258 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2259 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2260 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2261 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2262 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002263
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002264- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2265 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2266 embedded in a lambda expression.
2267
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002268- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2269 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2270 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2271 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2272 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2273
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002274- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2275 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2276 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2277
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002278- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2279 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2280
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002281- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2282 It's writable again.
2283
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002284- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2285 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2286 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002287 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002288
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002289- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2290 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2291 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2292
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002293Extension modules
2294-----------------
2295
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002296- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2297 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2298
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002299- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2300 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2301 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2302 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2303
2304- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2305 collection.
2306
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002307- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2308 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2309 unique within a single program run.
2310
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002311- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2312 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2313
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002314- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2315 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2316
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002317- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2318 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002319
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002320- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2321
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002322- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2323 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2324
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002325- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2326 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2327 for many BSD-derived systems.
2328
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002329
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002330Library
2331-------
2332
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002333- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2334 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2335 primary ones:
2336
2337 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2338 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2339 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2340
2341 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2342 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2343 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2344 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2345 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2346 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2347
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002348- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2349 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2350 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2351 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2352 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2353 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2354 argument.
2355
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002356- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2357 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2358 in the archive.
2359
2360- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2361 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2362
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002363- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2364 569574).
2365
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002366- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2367 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2368 no more.
2369
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002370- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2371 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2372 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2373 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2374 code coverage.
2375
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002376- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2377 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2378 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002379 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2380 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002381
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002382- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2383 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2384 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002385 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002386
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002387- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2388
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002389- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2390 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2391 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2392 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2393
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002394- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2395 handling.
2396
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002397- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2398 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2399
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002400- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2401 in socket.py.
2402
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002403- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2404
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002405- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2406 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2407 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2408 opener with proxy support.
2409
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002410- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2411
2412- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2413
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002414Tools/Demos
2415-----------
2416
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002417- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2418
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002419- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2420
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002421- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2422 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002423
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002424- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2425 files.
2426
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002427Build
2428-----
2429
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002430- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002431 different root directory.
2432
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002433C API
2434-----
2435
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002436- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2437 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2438 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2439 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2440 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2441 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2442 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2443 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2444 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2445 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2446
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002447- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2448 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2449 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2450 from Python.
2451
2452
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002453New platforms
2454-------------
2455
2456None this time.
2457
2458Tests
2459-----
2460
2461- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2462 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2463
2464Windows
2465-------
2466
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002467- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2468
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002469- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2470 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2471 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2472 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2473 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2474 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2475 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2476 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2477 that's what it's for.
2478
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002479Mac
2480---
2481
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002482- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2483 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2484 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2485 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002486- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2487 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2488- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002489
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002490SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2491------------------------------------
2492
2493430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2494598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2495622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2496661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2497683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2498697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2499713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2500724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2501727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2502729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2503730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2504731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2505732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2506733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2507735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2508740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2509744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2510745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2511747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2512749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2513751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2514753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2515755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2516757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2517760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2518
2519
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002520What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2521================================
2522
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002523*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002524
2525Core and builtins
2526-----------------
2527
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002528- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2529 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2530
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002531- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2532 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2533 and cannot be strings).
2534
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002535- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2536 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2537 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2538 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2539
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002540- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2541 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2542 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2543 Python itself.
2544
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002545- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2546 the referenced object, if it has one.
2547
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002548- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2549 the thread started at
2550 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2551
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002552- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2553 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2554 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2555 placed on a list index.
2556
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002557- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2558 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2559 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2560 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2561
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002562- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2563 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2564 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2565 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2566 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2567 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2568 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2569
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002570- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2571 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2572 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2573 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2574 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2575
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002576- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2577 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002578
2579- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2580 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2581 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2582 #693195.)
2583
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002584- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2585 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002586
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002587- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002588 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002589 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2590 interpreter executions, would fail.
2591
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002592- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002593 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002594 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002595
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002596Extension modules
2597-----------------
2598
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002599- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2600 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2601 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2602 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2603
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002604- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2605 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2606
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002607- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2608 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2609 and Greg Chapman.)
2610
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002611- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2612 recursively.
2613
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002614- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002615 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2616 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2617 leaks.
2618
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002619- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2620
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002621- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2622 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2623 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2624 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2625 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2626 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2627 #705836.
2628
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002629- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002630 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2631
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002632- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2633 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2634 See SF bug #692416.
2635
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002636- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2637 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2638
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002639- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2640 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2641 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002642
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002643- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002644 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2645 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2646
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002647- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2648 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2649 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2650 timeouts to work properly.
2651
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002652Library
2653-------
2654
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002655- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2656 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2657 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2658 future release.
2659
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002660- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2661 for querying platform dependent features.
2662
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002663- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002664
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002665- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2666 pickle protocol versions.
2667
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002668- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2669 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2670 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2671
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002672- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2673
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002674- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2675 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2676 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2677 modules.
2678
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002679- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2680 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2681 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2682
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002683- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2684 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2685
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002686- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2687 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2688 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2689
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002690- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002691 MS Office extensions.
2692
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002693- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2694 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2695
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002696- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2697 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2698
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002699- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2700 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2701 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2702 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2703 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2704 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2705
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002706- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2707 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2708 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002709
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002710- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2711 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2712 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2713
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002714- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2715
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002716- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2717 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2718 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2719
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002720Tools/Demos
2721-----------
2722
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002723- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2724 See the module docstring for details.
2725
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002726Build
2727-----
2728
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002729- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2730 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002731
2732C API
2733-----
2734
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002735- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2736
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002737- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2738 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2739 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2740
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002741- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2742 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002743
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002744 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2745 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2746 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002747
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002748- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002749 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2750
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002751- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2752 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2753 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002754
2755New platforms
2756-------------
2757
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002758None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002759
2760Tests
2761-----
2762
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002763- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2764 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002765
2766Windows
2767-------
2768
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002769- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2770 function.
2771
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002772- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2773 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002774
2775Mac
2776---
2777
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002778- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2779 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002780
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002781- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2782 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002783
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002784- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2785 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2786 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002787
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002788- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002789 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2790 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002791
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002792- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2793 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002794
2795
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002796What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2797=================================
2798
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002799*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002800
2801Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002802-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002803
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002804- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2805 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2806 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2807
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002808- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2809 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2810 (SF patch #664376.)
2811
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002812- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2813 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2814 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2815 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2816 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2817 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002818 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002819
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002820- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2821 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2822 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2823 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002824 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002825
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002826- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2827 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2828 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2829 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2830 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2831 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2832 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2833 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2834 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2835 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2836 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2837
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002838- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2839 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2840 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2841 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2842 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2843 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2844
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002845- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2846 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2847
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002848- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2849 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2850 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2851 case.)
2852
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002853- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2854 passed as unicode strings.
2855
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002856- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2857 See SF bug #683467.
2858
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002859- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2860 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2861
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002862- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2863
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002864- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2865
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002866- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2867 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2868 arguments.
2869
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002870- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2871 See SF bug #667147.
2872
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002873- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002874 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002875 See SF bug #676155.
2876
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002877- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002878 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002879 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2880 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2881 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2882 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2883 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2884 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002885
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002886Extension modules
2887-----------------
2888
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002889- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2890 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2891 tp_as_number pointer.
2892
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002893- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2894 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2895 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2896 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2897 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2898
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002899- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2900
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002901- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2902
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002903- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002904 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002905 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2906 patch #678531.)
2907
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002908- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2909 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2910
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002911- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2912 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2913
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002914- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2915
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002916- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2917 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2918 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2919
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002920- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2921
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002922- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2923 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2924
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002925- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002926
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002927- datetime changes:
2928
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002929 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2930
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002931 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2932 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2933 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2934 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2935 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2936 now.
2937
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002938 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002939 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2940 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002941
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002942 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002943 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002944 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2945 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2946 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2947 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002948
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002949 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2950 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2951 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002952 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2953
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002954 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2955 by a later example coded by Guido.
2956
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002957 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002958 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2959 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2960 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002961 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2962 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2963
2964 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2965 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2966 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2967 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2968 tzinfo subclass instance.
2969
2970 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2971 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2972 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2973 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2974 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2975 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2976 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2977 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002978
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002979 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2980 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2981 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2982 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2983 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002984 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2985
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002986 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002987
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002988 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2989 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2990 as a naive datetime object.
2991
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002992 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2993 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2994 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2995
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002996 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2997 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2998 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2999 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3000 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3001 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3002 comparison.
3003
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003004 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3005 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3006 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3007 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003008 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003009
3010 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003011
3012 and ::
3013
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003014 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3015
3016 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3017 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3018 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3019 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3020
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003021 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3022 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3023 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3024 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3025 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3026
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003027 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3028 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003029 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3030 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003031
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003032Library
3033-------
3034
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003035- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3036 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3037
3038- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3039 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3040 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3041 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3042 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3043 See PEP 307 for details.
3044
3045- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3046 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3047
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003048- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3049 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003050 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003051 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3052 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003053 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003054
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003055- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3056 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3057
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003058- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3059 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3060 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3061
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003062- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3063
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003064- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3065 exception.
3066
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003067- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3068 class.
3069
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003070- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3071 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3072 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3073
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003074- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3075 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3076
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003077- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003078 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3079 See SF bug #659228.
3080
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003081- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3082 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3083 See SF patch #651082.
3084
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003085- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003086
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003087- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3088 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3089
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003090- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003091 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003092
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003093- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3094 DOS paths from other platforms.
3095
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003096Tools/Demos
3097-----------
3098
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003099- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3100 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3101 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3102 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3103 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3104 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3105 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3106 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3107 example:
3108
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003109 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3110 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003111
3112 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3113
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003114
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003115Build
3116-----
3117
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003118- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3119 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3120 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003121 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3122
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003123 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3124
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003125- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3126 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3127 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3128 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3129 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3130 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3131 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3132 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3133 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3134
3135- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3136 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3137 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3138 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3139
3140- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3141 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3142
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003143C API
3144-----
3145
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003146- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3147 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003148
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003149- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3150 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3151 tp_as_number pointer.
3152
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003153- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3154 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3155 (SF #681367)
3156
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003157- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3158 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3159 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3160 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003161
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003162Tests
3163-----
3164
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003165- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003166 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3167 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3168 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3169 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3170 pydoc.)
3171
3172- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3173
3174- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003175
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003176Windows
3177-------
3178
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003179- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3180 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3181 time).
3182
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003183- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3184 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3185
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003186- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3187 release without strong cryptography.
3188
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003189- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003190 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003191
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003192- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3193 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3194
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003195Mac
3196---
3197
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003198- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3199 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003200
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003201- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3202 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3203 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003204
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003205- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3206 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003207
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003208- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3209 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3210 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3211 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003212
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003213- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003214 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3215 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3216 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003217
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003218
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003219What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003220=================================
3221
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003222*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003223
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003224Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003225--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003226
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003227- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3228
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003229- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3230 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003231 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003232 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003233 a different meaning than before.
3234
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003235- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003236 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003237 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003238
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003239- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003240 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003241 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003242
3243- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3244 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3245 and deallocation.
3246
3247- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3248 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3249
3250- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3251 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3252 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3253 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3254 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3255
3256- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3257 now detected by the garbage collector.
3258
3259- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3260 [SF bug 519621]
3261
3262- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3263 identifier.
3264
3265- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3266 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3267 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3268 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3269 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3270 [SF bug 563060]
3271
3272- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3273 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3274 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3275 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3276 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3277
3278- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3279 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3280 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3281
3282- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3283
3284- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3285 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3286 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3287 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3288 state of the slots would be lost.)
3289
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003290Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003291-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003292
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003293- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003294 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3295 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3296 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3297 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003298 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3299 Jython 2.1.
3300
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003301- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003302 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003303 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3304 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3305 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3306 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3307 these, see PEP 302.
3308
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003309- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3310 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3311 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3312
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003313- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3314 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3315 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3316
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003317- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3318 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3319 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3320
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003321- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3322 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3323 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3324 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3325 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3326 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3327 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3328 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3329 releases or implementations.
3330
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003331- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003332 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3333 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003334
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003335- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3336 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3337
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003338- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3339 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3340 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3341
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003342- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3343 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3344
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003345- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3346 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003347 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3348 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003349
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003350- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3351 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3352 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3353 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3354 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3355
3356 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3357 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3358 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3359 pattern.
3360
3361 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3362 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3363 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3364 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3365
3366 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3367 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3368 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3369 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3370 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3371 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3372
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003373- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3374 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3375 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3376 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3377 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3378 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3379 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3380 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003381
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003382- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3383 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3384 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3385 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3386 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003387 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3388 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3389 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3390 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3391 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3392 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3393 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003394
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003395- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3396 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3397
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003398- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3399 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3400 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3401 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3402 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3403 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3404 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3405 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3406 to Zack Weinberg!
3407
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003408- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3409 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3410 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3411 type. This has been fixed now.
3412
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003413- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3414 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3415 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3416
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003417- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3418 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3419 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3420 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3421 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3422 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3423 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3424 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003425 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003426
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003427- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3428 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3429 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003430
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003431- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3432 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3433 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3434 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3435 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3436 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3437 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3438 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003439 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003440 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3441 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3442
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003443- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3444 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3445 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3446 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3447 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3448 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3449 this.)
3450
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003451- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3452 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003453 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003454 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003455 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3456 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003457 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3458 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003459
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003460- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3461 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3462 currently running.
3463
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003464- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3465 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3466 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3467 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3468
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003469- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3470 as directory names.
3471
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003472- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3473 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3474
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003475- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3476 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3477
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003478- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003479 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3480 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003481
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003482- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3483 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3484 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3485 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3486 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3487
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003488- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3489 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3490 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3491 removed.
3492
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003493- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3494 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3495 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3496
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003497- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3498 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3499 to __debug__.
3500
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003501- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3502 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3503 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3504
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003505- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3506 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3507 deprecated now.
3508
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003509- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3510 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3511 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003512
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003513- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3514 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3515 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3516 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3517 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003518
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003519- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3520 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3521
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003522- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3523 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3524 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003525 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003526 is backward compatible.
3527
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003528- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3529 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3530 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3531 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3532 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3533
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003534- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3535 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3536 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3537 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3538 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3539 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003540
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003541- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3542 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3543
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003544- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3545 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3546
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003547- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3548 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3549 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3550 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3551 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3552
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003553- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3554 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3555 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3556
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003557- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003558 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3559
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003560- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3561 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3562 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003563
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003564- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3565 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3566
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003567- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3568 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3569 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3570
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003571- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3572
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003573Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003574-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003575
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003576- Added three operators to the operator module:
3577 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3578 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3579 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3580
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003581- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3582
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003583- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3584 archives.
3585
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003586- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3587 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3588 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3589
3590 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3591
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003592- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3593 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3594 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003595 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003596
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003597- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3598 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3599 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3600 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003601 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3602 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3603 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3604 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003605
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003606- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3607 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003608
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003609- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3610
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003611- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3612 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3613
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003614- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3615 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3616 supported.
3617
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003618- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3619
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003620- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3621 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003622
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003623- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3624 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3625
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003626- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3627
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003628- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3629 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3630
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003631- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3632 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3633 functions but callable type objects.
3634
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003635- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003636 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003637 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003638
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003639- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3640 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003641
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003642- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3643 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003644
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003645- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3646 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3647 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3648 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3649
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003650- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3651 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003652
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003653- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3654 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3655 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3656 and __imul__.
3657
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003658- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003659 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3660 is called.
3661
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003662- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3663 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3664 interpreter was compiled.
3665
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003666- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3667 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3668 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003669 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003670 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3671 1, not 2.
3672
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003673- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3674 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3675 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3676 limit.
3677
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003678- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3679 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3680 bug #623464.
3681
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003682- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3683 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3684 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3685 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3686
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003687Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003688-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003689
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003690- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3691
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003692- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3693 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3694 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3695 with Python 2.3a2.
3696
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003697- os.path exposes getctime.
3698
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003699- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003700 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003701 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003702 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003703 unit tests of floating point results.
3704
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003705- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3706 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3707 has been increased.
3708
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003709- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3710 executed.
3711
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003712- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3713 postinstallation script.
3714
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003715- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3716 test the current module.
3717
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003718- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003719 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3720 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3721 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3722 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3723
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003724- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003725 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003726 Ward's Optik package.
3727
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003728- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3729 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3730 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3731 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3732
3733- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3734 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003735 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003736
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003737- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3738 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3739 shelf are binary pickles.
3740
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003741- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3742 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3743
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003744- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3745 modules are iterators now.
3746
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003747- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3748 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3749 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3750 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3751 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3752 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003753
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003754- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3755 with their entity value.
3756
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003757- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3758
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003759- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3760 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003761
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003762- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3763 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003764 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003765
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003766- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3767 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3768 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3769 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3770 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3771 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3772 main():
3773
3774 import locale
3775 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3776
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003777- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3778 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3779
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003780- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3781 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3782 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3783 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3784 to the new standard.
3785
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003786- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3787 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3788 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3789 an extension to the database.
3790
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003791- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3792 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3793 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3794 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003795 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003796
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003797- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003798 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003799
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003800- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3801 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3802 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3803 bounded integers.
3804
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003805- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3806 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3807 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3808 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3809 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3810 in existence.
3811
3812 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3813 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3814 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3815 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3816 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3817 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3818
3819 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3820 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3821 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3822 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3823
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003824- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3825 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3826 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3827
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003828- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3829
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003830- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3831 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3832 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3833 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3834
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003835- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3836 argument.
3837
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003838- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3839 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3840 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3841 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3842 [SF patch 560794].
3843
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003844- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3845 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3846 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003847 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3848 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3849 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003850
3851- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3852 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003853
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003854- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3855 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3856 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3857 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003858
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003859- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3860 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3861 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3862 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3863 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3864
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003865- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003866
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003867- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3868
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003869- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3870 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3871 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3872 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3873 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3874 identical to None.
3875
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003876- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3877 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3878 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3879 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3880 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3881 results now.
3882
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003883- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3884 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3885
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003886- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3887 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3888 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3889 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3890 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3891 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3892 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3893 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3894
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003895- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3896
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003897- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3898 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3899
3900- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3901 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3902 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3903 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3904 and other systems.
3905
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003906- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3907 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3908 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3909 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 +00003910 work well with these.
3911
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003912- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3913
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003914- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003915 connections.
3916
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003917- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3918 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3919 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3920
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003921- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3922 sets
3923
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003924- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3925 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3926 name.
3927
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003928- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3929 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3930 passed in.
3931
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003932- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003933 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003934 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3935 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003936
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003937- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3938
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003939- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3940
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003941- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3942 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3943 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3944
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003945- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3946 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3947 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3948 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003949 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003950
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003951- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003952 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003953 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003954
3955- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3956 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3957 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3958
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003959- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003960 the value of its expression argument.
3961
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003962- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3963 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3964 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3965
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003966- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3967 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3968 skipstone browser was included.
3969
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003970- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3971 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3972
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003973Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003974-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003975
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003976- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3977 names in addition to accepting file names.
3978
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003979- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3980 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3981 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3982 still used and useful.)
3983
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003984- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3985 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3986 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3987 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003988
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003989- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3990 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3991 the generated binary.
3992
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003993Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003994-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003995
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003996- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3997
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003998- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3999 except in the hands of experts.
4000
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004001- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004002 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4003 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4004 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004005
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004006- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4007 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4008 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4009 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4010 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4011 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4012 builds.
4013
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004014- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4015 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4016 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4017 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4018 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4019 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4020 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4021 new type.
4022
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004023- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004024
4025 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4026 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4027 positive infinities.
4028
4029 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4030 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4031 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4032 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4033 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4034 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4035 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4036
4037 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4038
4039 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4040
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004041- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4042 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4043 size of the executable.
4044
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004045- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4046 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4047 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4048 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004049
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004050- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4051
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004052- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4053 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4054 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004055
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004056- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4057 well as Unix.
4058
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004059- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4060 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4061 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4062 modules in the README file for details.
4063
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004064C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004065-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004066
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004067- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4068 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004069 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004070 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004071 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004072
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004073- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4074 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4075 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4076 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4077 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4078 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004079 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004080 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4081 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4082 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4083 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4084 aligned.)
4085
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004086- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4087 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4088 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4089
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004090- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4091 level.
4092
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004093- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4094 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4095 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4096 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4097 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4098
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004099- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4100 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4101 code.
4102
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004103- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4104 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4105 adjusting for negative indices.
4106
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004107- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4108 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4109 object.
4110
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004111- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4112 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4113 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4114
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004115- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4116 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004117
4118- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4119
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004120- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4121 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4122 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4123 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4124
4125- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4126
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004127- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004128
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004129- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004130 without going through the buffer API.
4131
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004133
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004134- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4135 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4136 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4137 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4138
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004139- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4140 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4141
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004142- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004143 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4144
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004145New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004147
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004148- OpenVMS is now supported.
4149
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004150- AtheOS is now supported.
4151
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004152- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4153
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004154- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4155
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004156Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004157-----
4158
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004159- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4160 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4161 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004162
4163Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004164-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004165
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004166- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4167 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4168 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4169 bugs.
4170 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004171 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004172 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4173 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004174 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004175
4176- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004177 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004178
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004179- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4180 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4181
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004182- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4183 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004184 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004185 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4186
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004187- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4188 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4189 use files" uninstall option).
4190
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004191- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4192
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004193- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4194 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4195
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004196- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4197 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4198 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4199
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004200- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4201 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4202 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4203 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4204 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004205 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4206 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4207 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004208
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004209- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004210 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004211 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4212 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4213 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4214 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4215 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4216 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4217 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4218 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4219 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4220 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4221 work around.
4222
4223- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4224 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4225 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4226 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4227 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4228 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4229 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4230 specified with O_CREAT too).
4231
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004232Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004233----
4234
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004235- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004236
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004237- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4238 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4239 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4240
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004241- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4242 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4243 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4244
4245- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4246 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4247 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4248 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4249 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4250 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4251 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4252 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004253
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004254- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4255 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4256 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004257
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004258- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4259 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4260 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4261 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4262 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004263
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004264- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4265 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4266 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004267
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004268- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4269 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004270
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004271- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4272 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4273 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4274 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4275 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004276
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004277- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4278 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4279 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4280
4281- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4282 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4283 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004284
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004285- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4286 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4287 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4288 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004289 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004290
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004291- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4292 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004293
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004294- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4295 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004296
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004297- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004298 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004299 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4300 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004301
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004302
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004303What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004304===============================
4305
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4307
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004308Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004309--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004310
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004311- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4312 with a custom metaclass.
4313
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004314Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004315-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004316
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004317- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4318 are proxies.
4319
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004320Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004321-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004322
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004323- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4324 very short strings.
4325
4326- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4327 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4328 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4329 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4330 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4331
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004332Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004333-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004334
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004335- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4336 close or delete time).
4337
4338- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4339 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4340
4341- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4342
4343- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004344 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004345
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004346Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004347-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004348
4349Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004350-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004351
4352C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004354
4355New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004356-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004357
4358Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004359-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004360
4361Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004362-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004363
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004364- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4365
4366- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4367 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4368
4369- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4370 deleted at process exit time.
4371
4372- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4373 in backslash.
4374
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004375Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004376----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004377
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004378- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4379 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4380 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4381
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004382
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004383What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004384===========================
4385
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004386*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4387
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004388Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004389--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004390
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004391- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4392 been extensively updated. See
4393
4394 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4395
4396 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4397
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004398- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4399 deleted!
4400
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004401- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4402 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4403 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4404 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4405 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4406
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004407- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4408
4409 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4410 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4411
4412 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4413 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4414 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4415 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4416 supported anyway.
4417
4418 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4419 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4420
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004421- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4422 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4423 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4424 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4425 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004426
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004427- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4428 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4429 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4430
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004431Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004432-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004433
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004434- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4435 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4436 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4437 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4438 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4439 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004440 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4441 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4442 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4443 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004444
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004445- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4446 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4447 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4448
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004449Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004450-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004451
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004452- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4453
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004454Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004455-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004456
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004457- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4458 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4459 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4460 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4461 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4462 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4463
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004464- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4465
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004466- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4467
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004468- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4469
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004470- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4471 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4472 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4473
4474- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4475
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004476Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004477-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004478
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004479- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4480 off a search on Google.
4481
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004482Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004483-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004484
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004485- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4486 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4487 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4488 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4489 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4490 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4491 other platforms should do likewise.
4492
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004493- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4494 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4495 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4496
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004497C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004498-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004499
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004500- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4501 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4502 producing key-value pairs.
4503
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004504- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004505 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004506 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4507 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4508 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4509 previously went unchallenged.
4510
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004511New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004512-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004513
4514Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004515-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004516
4517Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004518-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004519
4520Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004521----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004522
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004523- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4524 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004525
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004526- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4527 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4528 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4529 home.
4530
4531
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004532What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004533===========================
4534
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004535*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4536
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004537Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004538--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004539
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004540- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4541 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004542
4543 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004544 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004545
4546 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4547 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004548 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004549 This needs to be documented.
4550
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004551- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4552 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4553
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004554- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4555 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4556 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4557
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004558- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4559 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4560
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004561- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4562 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4563 class forbids it).
4564
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004565- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4566 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4567 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4568
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004569- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4570
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004571Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004572-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004573
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004574- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4575 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004576 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004577
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004578- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4579 (like 1 + '').
4580
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004581Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004582-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004583
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004584- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4585 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4586 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4587 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004588 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004589 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4590
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004591- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4592 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4593 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4594 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4595
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004596- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4597 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004598 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4599 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4600 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004601
4602- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4603 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004604
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004605- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4606 bytes on its input.
4607
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004608Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004609-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004610
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004611- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004612 convenience function.
4613
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004614- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4615 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4616 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004617 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4618 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4619 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4620 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4621 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4622 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004623
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004624- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4625 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4626 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4627 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4628
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004629- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4630 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4631 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4632
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004633- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4634 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4635 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4636 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4637
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004638- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4639 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004640 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004641 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4642 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4643 new -l and -e options.
4644
4645- statcache is now deprecated.
4646
4647- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4648 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004649 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004650 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4651 time properly taken into account.
4652
4653- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4654 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4655 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4656 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4657
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004658Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004659-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004660
4661Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004663
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004664- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4665 is built with libdb3 if available.
4666
4667- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4668
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004669C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004670-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004671
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004672- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4673 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4674 PySequence_Size().
4675
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004676- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4677
4678- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4679 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4680 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4681
4682- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4683 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4684
4685- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4686 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4687
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004688New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004689-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004690
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004691- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4692 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4693
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004694- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4695 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4696
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004697- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4698
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004699Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004700-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004701
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004702- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4703 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4704
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004705Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004706-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004707
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004708Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004709----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004710
4711- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4712 removed completely in the next release.
4713
4714- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4715 OSX.
4716
4717- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4718 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4719
4720- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4721
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004722
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004723What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004724===========================
4725
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004726*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4727
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004728Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004729--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004730
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004731- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004732 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004733 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004734 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4735 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004736 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4737 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004738 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4739 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004740
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004741- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4742 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4743
4744- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4745 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4746
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004747Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004748-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004749
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004750- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4751 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4752 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4753 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4754 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4755 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4756 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4757 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4758
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004759- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4760 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4761 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4762 example).
4763
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004764- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004765 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004766 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004767 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004768
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004769- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4770 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4771 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004772 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004773
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004774- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4775 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4776 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4777 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4778 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4779 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4780
4781 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4782
4783 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4784
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004785Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004786-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004787
4788- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4789
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004790- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4791
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004792- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4793 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004794
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004795- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4796 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4797 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4798 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4799 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4800 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004801 attributes.
4802
4803- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4804 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4805 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004806
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004807- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4808 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4809 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004810
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004811- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4812 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4813 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004814 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4815 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4816
4817- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4818 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004819
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004820Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004821-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004822
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004823- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4824 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4825
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004826- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4827 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4828 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4829 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4830
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004831- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4832 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4833 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4834 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4835
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004836 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4837 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4838 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4839 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4840 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4841 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4842 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4843 without losing information).
4844
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004845- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004846 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4847 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4848 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4849 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4850 module).
4851
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004852 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004853 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4854 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4855 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4856 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004857
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004858- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004859 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4860 encoding.
4861
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004862- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4863 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4864
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004866 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4867
4868- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4869 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4870 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4871 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4872
4873- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4874
4875- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4876 ON, and OFF.
4877
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004878- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4879 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4880
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004881Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004882-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004883
4884- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4885 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4886 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004887
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004888- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4889 been added: -X and -E.
4890
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004891Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004892-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004893
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004894- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4895 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4896
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004897C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004898-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004899
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004900- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4901 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4902 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4903 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4904 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4905
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004906- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4907 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4908 as long) arguments.
4909
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004910- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4911 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4912 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4913 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4914 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4915 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4916
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004917- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4918 input.
4919
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004920New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004921-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004922
4923Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004924-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004925
4926Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004927-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004928
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004929- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4930 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4931 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4932
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004933- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4934 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4935 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004936 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004937
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004938 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4939 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4940 import signal
4941 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004942
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004943 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004944 while 1:
4945 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004946 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004947 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4948 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4949 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4950 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004951
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004952
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004953What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4954===========================
4955
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004956*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4957
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004958Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004959--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004960
4961- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4962 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4963 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4964
4965- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4966 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4967 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4968 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4969 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4970 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4971 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004972
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004973- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004974 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004975 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4976 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4977 associate a docstring with a property.
4978
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004979- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4980 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4981 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4982 other built-in object types.
4983
4984- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4985 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4986 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4987 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4988 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4989
4990- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4991 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4992
4993- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4994 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004995 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004996 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4997 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4998 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4999 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5000 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5001
5002- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5003 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5004 class.
5005
5006- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5007 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5008 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5009 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5010
5011- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5012 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5013 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5014 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5015
5016- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5017 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5018
5019- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5020 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5021 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5022 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5023 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005024 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005025 with the same value as s.
5026
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005027- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5028
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005029Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005030----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005031
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005032- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5033
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005034- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5035 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5036 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5037 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5038 objects.
5039
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005040- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5041 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005042 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5043 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5044
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005045- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5046 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5047 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5048
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005049Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005050-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005051
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005052- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5053 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5054 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5055 by the instances.
5056
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005057- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5058 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5059 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5060
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005061- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5062 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5063 before the entire comparison is complete.
5064
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005065- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5066 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5067 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5068
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005069- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5070 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5071 getwriter().
5072
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005073- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5074 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5075
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005076- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005077 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5078 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5079
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005080- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5081 iterable object.
5082
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005083- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5084 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005085
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005086- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5087 authentication.
5088
5089- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5090 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005091
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005092- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005093 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5094 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5095 a sample driver.)
5096
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005097Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005098-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005099
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005100- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5101 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5102 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5103 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5104 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5105 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5106 kernel has large file support.
5107
5108- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5109 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5110 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5111 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5112 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5113
5114- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5115 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5116 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5117
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005118C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005119-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005120
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005121- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5122 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5123
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005124New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005125-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005126
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005127- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5128 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5129
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005130Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005131-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005132
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005133- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5134 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5135 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5136 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5137 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5138
5139- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5140 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5141 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5142 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5143
5144- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5145 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5146
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005147Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005148-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005149
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005150- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005151 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5152 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005153
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005154
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005155What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5156===========================
5157
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005158*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5159
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005160Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005161----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005162
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005163- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5164 big to represent as a C double.
5165
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005166- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5167 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5168 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5169 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5170 restriction).
5171
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005172- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5173 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5174 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5175 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5176 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5177
5178 >>> dir([])
5179 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5180 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5181 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5182 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5183 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5184 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5185 'reverse', 'sort']
5186
5187 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5188
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005189- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005190 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5191 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5192 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5193 OverflowError exception.
5194
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005195- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005196 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005197 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5198 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5199 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5200 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5201 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005202 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005203 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5204 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5205
5206 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5207 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5208 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5209 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005210
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005211- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005212 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5213 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5214 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5215 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5216 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5217 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5218 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5219 once it is created.
5220
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005221- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5222 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5223 (key, value) pairs.
5224
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005225- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005226 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5227 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5228
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005229- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5230 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5231 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5232 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5233 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005234
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005235- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005236 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5237 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5238
5239 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5240
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005241- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005242 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5243
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005244Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005245-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005246
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005247- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005248 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5249 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005250
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005251- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5252 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5253 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5254 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5255 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5256 in this area anymore).
5257
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005258- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5259 threading.Timer.
5260
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005261- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5262 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5263
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005264- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005265 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5266
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005267- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005268 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5269 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5270 converted to Python longs.
5271
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005272- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005273 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5274
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005275- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5276 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5277 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5278
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005279Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005280-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005281
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005282- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5283 division operators as per PEP 238.
5284
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005285Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005286-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005287
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005288- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5289 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5290 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5291 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5292
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005293C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005294-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005295
5296- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005297
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005298- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5299 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005300 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005301
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005302 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5303 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005304 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005305 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005306
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005307- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005308 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5309 module:
5310
5311 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005312
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005313 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5314 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005315
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005316 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5317 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005318
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005319 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5320
5321 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5322
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005323- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005324 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5325 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5326 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005327
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005328New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005329-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005330
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005331- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5332 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5333 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5334 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5335 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005336
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005337Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005338-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005339
5340Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005341-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005342
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005343- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5344 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5345 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5346 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005347 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5348 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5349 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5350 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5351 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005352
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005353- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005354 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5355
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005356
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005357What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5358===========================
5359
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005360*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5361
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005362Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005363-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005364
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005365- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5366 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5367
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005368- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5369 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5370 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005371
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005372- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5373 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5374 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5375 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005376
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005377- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5378
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005379- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005380
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005381Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005382-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005383
5384- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005385 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005386 the module docstring for details.
5387
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005388Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005389-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005390
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005391- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005392 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5393 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5394 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005395
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005396- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5397 Nick Mathewson.
5398
5399Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005400----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005401
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005402- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5403 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5404 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5405 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5406 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5407 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5408 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5409 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5410
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005411- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5412 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5413 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5414 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5415
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005416- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5417 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5418 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5419 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5420 come a long way).
5421
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005422- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5423 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5424 write filters for these warnings).
5425
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005426- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5427 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5428 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5429 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5430 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5431
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005432- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5433 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5434 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5435 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5436 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5437 older distribution.
5438
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005439Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005440-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005441
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005442- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5443 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005444 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005445
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005446- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5447 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5448 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5449
5450- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5451
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005452- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5453
5454- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5455
5456- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5457
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005458- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005459
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005460- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5461
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005462New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005463-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005464
5465C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005466-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005467
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005468- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5469 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5470 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5471 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5472 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5473 against buffer overruns.
5474
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005475- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005476 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5477 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005478 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5479 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5480 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5481
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005482- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5483 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5484 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5485 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5486 deprecated.
5487
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005488Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005489-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005490
5491- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5492 relevant is found.
5493
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005494
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005495What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005496===========================
5497
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005498*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5499
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005500Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005501----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005502
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005503- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5504 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5505 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5506 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5507 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5508 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5509 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5510 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005511 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005512 repaired.
5513
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005514- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005515 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005516 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5517 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5518 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5519 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5520 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5521 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5522 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5523 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5524
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005525- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5526 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5527 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5528 leading BMO character).
5529
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005530- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5531 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5532 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5533
5534 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5535 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5536 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005537
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005538 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5539 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5540 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5541 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5542 for various simple to use conversions.
5543
5544 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5545 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5546
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005547 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5548 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5549 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5550 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5551 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5552 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5553 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5554 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5555 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5556 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5557 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5558 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5559 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5560 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5561 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005562
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005563- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5564 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5565 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005566 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005567 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005568
5569 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005570 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5571 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5572 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5573 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5574 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005575 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5576 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005577
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005578 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5579 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5580 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005581 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005582
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005583- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5584 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5585 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5586 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5587 floating arithmetic,
5588
5589 x = 9007199254740992.0
5590 print long(x)
5591
5592 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5593 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5594 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5595 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5596 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5597 functions are of good quality).
5598
5599 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5600 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5601 algorithms to break.
5602
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005603- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5604 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5605 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5606 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5607 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5608 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5609 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5610 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5611 order.
5612
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005613- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5614 operation along the most common code paths.
5615
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005616- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5617 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5618
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005619- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5620 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5621 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5622 {}.update(UserDict())
5623
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005624- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5625 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5626 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5627 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5628 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5629 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5630 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5631 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5632
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005633- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005634 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005635
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005636 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005637 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5638 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005639 join() method of strings
5640 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005641 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5642 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005643 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005644 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005645
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005646- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5647 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5648
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005649- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5650 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5651
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005652- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5653 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5654 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5655 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5656
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005657- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5658 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005659 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005660 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5661 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005662
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005663- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5664
5665
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005666Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005667-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005668
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005669- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005670 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005671 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5672 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5673
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005674- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5675 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5676
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005677- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5678 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5679 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5680 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5681
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005682- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5683 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5684 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5685
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005686- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5687
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005688- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5689
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005690- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5691 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5692 that are still imported into string.py).
5693
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005694- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5695
5696- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5697 Now it does.
5698
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005699- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5700
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005701- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5702 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5703 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5704 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5705 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005706 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5707 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005708
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005709- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5710 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5711 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5712 'help(object)'.
5713
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005714Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005715-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005716
5717- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005718 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005719 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5720 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5721
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005722- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005723 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5724 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005725
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005726C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005727-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005728
5729- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5730 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005731
5732----
5733
5734**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**