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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000013- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
14 list.sort().
15
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000016
17Extension Modules
18-----------------
19
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000020- array.array objects are now picklable.
21
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000022- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
23 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
24
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000025- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
26 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
27 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
28
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000029
30Library
31-------
32
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +000033- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
34 (Bug #951915).
35
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +000036- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
37 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
38 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
39 encoding alias table
40
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +000041- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
42
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000043- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
44 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
45
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +000046- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
47
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +000048- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
49
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +000050- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
51
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +000052- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
53
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +000054- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
55
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +000056- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
57 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
58 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
59
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000060- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000061 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000062
63
64Build
65-----
66
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +000067- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
68 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
69 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
70 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
71 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
72 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
73 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
74 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
75
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000076
77C API
78-----
79
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +000080- Removed PyRange_New().
81
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000082
83Tests
84-----
85
86
87Mac
88---
89
90
91
92Tools/Demos
93-----------
94
95
96
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000097What's New in Python 2.4 final?
98===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000099
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000100*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000101
102Core and builtins
103-----------------
104
105- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
106 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
107 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
108
109
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000110What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
111==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000112
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000113*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000114
115Core and builtins
116-----------------
117
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000118- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
119 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
120 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
121
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000122
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000123Library
124-------
125
126- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
127 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
128 raised is re-raised.
129
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000130- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
131 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
132
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000133- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
134 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
135 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
136 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
137 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
138 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
139 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
140 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
141 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
142 by the slice are recomputed now.
143
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000144- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000145
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000146Build
147-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000148
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000149- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
150 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
151 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000152
153C API
154-----
155
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000156- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
157
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000158
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000159What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
160================================
161
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000162*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000163
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000164License
165-------
166
167The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
168is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
169changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
170Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
171intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
172durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
173the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
174License::
175
176 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
177
178says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
179to Python 2.1.1.
180
181The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
182License Version 2.
183
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000184Core and builtins
185-----------------
186
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000187- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
188 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
189 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
190 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
191 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
192 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
193 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
194 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
195 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
196 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
197
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000198- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000199
200Extension Modules
201-----------------
202
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000203- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
204 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
205 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
206 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000207
208Library
209-------
210
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000211- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
212 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
213 returned.
214
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000215- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
216
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000217- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
218 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
219
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000220- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
221
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000222- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
223 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000224
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000225- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
226
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000227- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
228
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000229- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000230 the source code is updated and reloaded.
231
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000232Build
233-----
234
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000235- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000236
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000237What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
238================================
239
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000240*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000241
242Core and builtins
243-----------------
244
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000245- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000246 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
247
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000248- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
249 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
250 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
251 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
252
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000253- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
254 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
255
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000256- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
257 constant.
258
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000259- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
260 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
261 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
262 large), and to anomalies such as
263 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
264 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
265 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
266 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000267
268Extension modules
269-----------------
270
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000271- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
272 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000273 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
274 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
275 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000276
277Library
278-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000279
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000280- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000281 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000282 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
283 --swig-cpp.
284
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000285- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
286 it is set.
287
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000288- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000289
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000290- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
291 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
292 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
293 Closes bug #1039270.
294
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000295- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000296
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000297 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000298 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
299 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
300 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
301 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
302 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
303 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
304 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
305 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
306 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
307 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
308 + Updates to documentation.
309
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000310- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
311 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
312 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
313 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
314
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000315- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000316
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000317- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
318 applications should use the getmember function.
319
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000320- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
321
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000322- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
323 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
324 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
325 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
326 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
327 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
328 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
329 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
330 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
331
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000332- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
333 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000334 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000335
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000336- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
337 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
338 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
339 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
340 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
341 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
342 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
343 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000344
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000345- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
346 the new public features (of which there are many).
347
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000348- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000349 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
350 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
351 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
352 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000353 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000354
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000355- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
356
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000357- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
358 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
359 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
360 options.
361
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000362- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
363 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
364 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
365 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
366 conditions under which non-string values work.
367
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000368Build
369-----
370
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000371- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
372 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
373 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
374
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000375- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
376 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
377 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
378 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
379 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000380
381C API
382-----
383
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000384- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
385 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
386
387- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
388
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000389- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
390 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
391 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
392 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
393 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
394 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
395 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
396 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
397 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
398
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000399- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
400
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000401- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
402 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
403 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000404
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000405Tests
406-----
407
408- test__locale ported to unittest
409
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000410Mac
411---
412
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000413- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
414 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
415 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000416
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000417Tools/Demos
418-----------
419
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000420- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
421 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
422 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
423 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
424 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000425
426
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000427What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
428=================================
429
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000430*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000431
432Core and builtins
433-----------------
434
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000435- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000436 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
437
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000438- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
439 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
440 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
441 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
442 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
443 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
444 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
445 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000446 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
447 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
448 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
449 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
450 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000451
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000452- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
453 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
454 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
455 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
456 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
457
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000458- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
459
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000460- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
461 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
462
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000463- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
464 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
465 modified the list.
466
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000467- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
468 functions is now writable.
469
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000470- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
471 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
472 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
473 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
474
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000475- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
476 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
477 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
478 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
479 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000480
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000481- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
482 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
483
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000484Extension modules
485-----------------
486
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000487- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
488
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000489- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
490 data.
491
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000492- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
493 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
494 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
495 supposed to have been truncated away.
496
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000497- Added socket.socketpair().
498
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000499- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
500 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
501
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000502- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000503 versions of Python, have now been removed.
504
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000505Library
506-------
507
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000508- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000509 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000510
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000511- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
512 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
513
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000514- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
515 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
516
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000517- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
518
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000519- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
520 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000521
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000522- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
523 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
524
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000525- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
526
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000527- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
528
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000529- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
530
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000531- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
532 Percivall.
533
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000534- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
535 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
536
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000537- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
538 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
539 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000540 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000541
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000542- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
543 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
544 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
545 and exponent.
546
547- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
548
549- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
550 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
551 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
552
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000553- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
554 to the readline module.
555
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000556- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000557 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
558 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000559
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000560- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
561 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
562 contains symlinks.
563
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000564- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
565 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
566
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000567- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
568 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
569 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
570
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000571- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
572 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
573 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
574 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
575 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
576 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
577 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
578 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
579 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
580 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
581 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
582 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
583 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
584
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000585- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
586
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000587Tools/Demos
588-----------
589
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000590- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
591 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
592
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000593- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
594
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000595Build
596-----
597
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000598- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
599 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
600 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
601 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
602 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
603 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
604 plans to do so.
605
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000606- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
607 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
608
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000609- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
610 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
611
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000612- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
613 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
614
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000615- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
616 GNU/k*BSD systems.
617
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000618- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
619 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
620
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000621C API
622-----
623
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000624..
625
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000626Documentation
627-------------
628
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000629- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
630 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
631
632- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
633 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
634 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000635
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000636New platforms
637-------------
638
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000639- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
640
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000641Tests
642-----
643
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000644..
645
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000646Windows
647-------
648
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000649- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
650 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
651 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
652 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
653 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
654 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
655 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
656 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
657 the problem.
658
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000659Mac
660---
661
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000662..
663
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000664
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000665What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
666=================================
667
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000668*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000669
670Core and builtins
671-----------------
672
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000673- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
674 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
675 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
676 sensitive code.
677
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000678- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000679 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000680
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000681 @staticmethod
682 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000683
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000684 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000685
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000686- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
687 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
688 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
689 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
690 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
691 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
692 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
693 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
694 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
695 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
696 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
697
698 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
699 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
700 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
701 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
702 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
703 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
704 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
705
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000706- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
707 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
708
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000709- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000710 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000711
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000712- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000713 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000714 which was missing for no apparent reason.
715
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000716- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000717 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
718 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
719
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000720- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
721 types that support garbage collection.
722
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000723- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
724
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000725- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
726 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
727 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
728 Jython.
729
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000730- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
731
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000732- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
733 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
734
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000735- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
736 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
737 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000738
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000739- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
740 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
741 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
742
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000743Extension modules
744-----------------
745
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000746- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
747
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000748Library
749-------
750
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000751- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
752 TIS-620
753
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000754- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
755 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
756 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
757 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
758 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
759 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
760 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
761 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
762 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
763 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
764
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000765- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
766
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000767- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
768 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
769 same as when the argument is omitted).
770 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
771
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000772- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
773
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000774- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
775 schemes are offered.
776
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000777- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
778
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000779- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
780 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
781 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
782
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000783- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
784
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000785- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
786 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
787
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000788- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
789 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
790 when dummy_threading is being used.
791
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000792- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
793 from a tarfile.
794
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000795- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000796 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000797
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000798- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
799 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
800 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
801 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
802
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000803- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
804 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
805
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000806- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
807 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
808 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
809 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
810 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
811 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
812 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
813 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
814 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
815 by some other method in progress).
816
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000817- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
818 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
819 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000820
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000821- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
822
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000823- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
824 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
825 AM Kuchling.
826
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000827- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
828 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
829 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
830
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000831- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
832 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
833 instead of unsigned.
834
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000835- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000836 no longer part of the public API.
837
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000838- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
839 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
840 string methods of the same name).
841
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000842- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000843 SF patch 945642.
844
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000845- doctest unittest integration improvements:
846
847 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
848
849 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
850 DocTestSuites.
851
852- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
853 that provide thread-local data.
854
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000855- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
856 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
857
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000858- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
859
860- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
861 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
862 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
863
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000864- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
865
866 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
867 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
868 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000869
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000870 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
871 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
872 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
873 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
874
875 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
876 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
877
878 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
879 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
880 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
881 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
882
883 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
884 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
885 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
886 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
887 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
888
889 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
890 wrapping help output.
891
892 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
893 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
894 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000895
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000896C API
897-----
898
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000899- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
900 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
901 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
902 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
903 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
904 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
905 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
906 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
907 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
908 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
909 its visible semantics have not changed.
910
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000911- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
912 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
913
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000914Documentation
915-------------
916
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000917- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000918
919 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000920 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000921
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000922 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000923
924 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
925
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000926- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000927
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000928Tests
929-----
930
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000931- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000932 platforms that use the Makefile.
933
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000934- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
935 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
936 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
937
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000938
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000939What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
940=================================
941
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000942*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000943
944Core and builtins
945-----------------
946
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000947- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
948 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
949 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
950 objects now (one object instead of three).
951
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000952- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
953 Windows DLLs.
954
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000955- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
956 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000957
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000958- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
959 a new .pyc magic.
960
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000961- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
962 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
963 be there.
964
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000965- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
966 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
967 the LC_NUMERIC category.
968
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000969- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
970 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
971 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
972
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000973- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
974
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000975- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
976 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
977 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000978
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000979- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
980 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
981
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000982- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
983
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000984- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000985 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000986
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000987- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
988
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000989- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
990
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000991- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
992 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
993
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000994- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
995 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
996 Fixes bug #858016 .
997
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000998- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
999 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1000 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1001
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001002- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1003 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1004 improves their performance (about 35%).
1005
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001006- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1007 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1008 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1009
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001010- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1011 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1012 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1013 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1014
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001015- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1016 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1017 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1018 length is not known).
1019
1020- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1021 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001022 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1023 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001024 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1025
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001026- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1027 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1028
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001029- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1030 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1031 keyword arguments.
1032
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001033- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1034 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1035 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1036
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001037- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1038 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1039 cases.
1040
1041- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1042 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1043 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1044 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1045 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1046 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1047 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1048 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1049 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1050 a release build.
1051
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001052- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1053 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1054
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001055- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001056 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001057
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001058- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1059 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1060 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1061 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1062 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1063 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1064 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1065 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1066 destroyed.
1067
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001068- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1069 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1070 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1071 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1072 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1073 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1074 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1075 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1076
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001077- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1078 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1079 character other than a space.
1080
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001081- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1082 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1083 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1084 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1085 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1086 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1087 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1088 attributes with the same name.
1089
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001090- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1091 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1092 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1093 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1094 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1095 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1096 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1097 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1098 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1099 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1100 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1101 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1102 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1103 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001104
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001105- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1106 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1107 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1108 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1109 This has been repaired.
1110
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001111- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1112
1113- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1114
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001115- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1116 over a sequence.
1117
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001118- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001119 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001120
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001121- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1122
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001123- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1124 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1125 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1126 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1127 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1128 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1129 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1130 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1131
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001132- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1133 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1134 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1135
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001136- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1137 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1138 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1139 freelist.
1140
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001141- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1142 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1143
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001144- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1145 number.
1146
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001147- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1148 a TypeError exception.
1149
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001150- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1151 820195.
1152
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001153- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1154 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1155 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1156
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001157- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001158 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1159 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001160
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001161- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1162 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1163 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1164
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001165- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1166 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001167 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001168
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001169- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001170 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1171 the first call.
1172
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001173
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001174Extension modules
1175-----------------
1176
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001177- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1178 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1179
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001180- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1181 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1182 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1183 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1184 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1185 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1186 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001187
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001188- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1189
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001190- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1191
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001192- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1193 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1194
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001195- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1196 fewer false positives.
1197
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001198- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1199 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1200
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001201- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001202 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1203
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001204- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001205 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001206 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001207 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1208 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001209
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001210- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1211 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1212 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1213 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1214
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001215- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1216 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1217 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1218 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1219 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1220 #897625.
1221
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001222- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1223 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1224
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001225- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1226 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1227 and pops on either side of the deque.
1228
1229- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1230 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1231
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001232- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1233 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1234 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1235 other functions that expect a function argument.
1236
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001237- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1238
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001239- os.getsid was added.
1240
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001241- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1242 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1243 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1244
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001245- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1246
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001247- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1248
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001249- readline.clear_history was added.
1250
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001251- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1252
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001253- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1254
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001255- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1256
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001257- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1258
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001259- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1260
1261- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1262
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001263- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1264
1265- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1266
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001267- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1268 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1269 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1270
1271- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1272 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1273 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1274 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1275 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1276 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1277 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1278
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001279- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1280 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1281 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1282 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001283
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001284- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001285 iterators from a single iterable.
1286
1287- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1288 of raising a TypeError exception.
1289
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001290- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1291 as parameter.
1292
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001293Library
1294-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001295
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001296- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1297 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1298 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001299
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001300- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1301 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1302 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001303
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001304- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001305
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001306- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1307 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001308
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001309- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1310 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1311
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001312- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1313
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001314- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001315 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001316
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001317- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001318 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001319
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001320- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1321
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001322- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1323 on cygwin and mingw32.
1324
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001325- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1326
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001327- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1328 module.
1329
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001330- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1331 installation scheme for all platforms.
1332
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001333- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001334 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001335
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001336- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1337 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1338 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1339
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001340- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1341 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1342 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1343
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001344- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1345
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001346- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1347
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001348- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1349 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1350
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001351- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1352 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1353 type pattern with the same value exists.
1354
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001355- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1356 when run from the command prompt).
1357
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001358- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1359 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1360
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001361- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1362 default sort).
1363
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001364- Added global runctx function to profile module
1365
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001366- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1367
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001368- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1369
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001370- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1371
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001372- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001373 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1374 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1375 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1376 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1377 accordingly.
1378
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001379- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1380 decoding standards.
1381
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001382- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1383 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1384 called for all requests.
1385
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001386- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1387 they are passed to the compiler.
1388
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001389- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1390 indent, width and depth.
1391
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001392- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1393 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1394
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001395- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1396 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1397
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001398- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1399
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001400- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1401
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001402- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1403
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001404- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1405 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1406
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001407- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001408 for better performance.
1409
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001410- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001411
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001412- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1413 a string).
1414
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001415- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1416
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001417- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1418
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001419- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1420
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001421- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1422
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001423- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1424 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1425 list of fieldnames.
1426
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001427- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1428 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1429
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001430- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1431
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001432- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1433 empty lists.
1434
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001435- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1436 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1437 and shelves.
1438
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001439- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1440 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1441
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001442- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001443 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1444 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001445
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001446- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1447 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001448 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001449
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001450- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001451 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1452 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1453
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001454- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1455 and removed in Py2.4.
1456
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001457- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1458
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001459- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1460
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001461Tools/Demos
1462-----------
1463
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001464- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1465 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1466
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001467- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1468
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001469- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1470 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1471 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1472 destination in situations where both files are given.
1473
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001474- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1475 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1476 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1477 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1478
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001479- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1480
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001481- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1482 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1483 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1484 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1485 now.
1486
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001487- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1488 in effect
1489
1490- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1491 C-c C-h
1492
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001493- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1494 -d option was given.
1495
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001496Build
1497-----
1498
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001499- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1500 build under OS X.
1501
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001502- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1503 --enable-profiling.
1504
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001505- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1506 is configured --with-tsc.
1507
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001508- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1509 on AMD64.
1510
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001511- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1512 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1513
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001514- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1515 removed.
1516
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001517- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1518 supported (see PEP 11).
1519
1520- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1521
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001522- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1523
1524- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1525 (see PEP 11).
1526
1527- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1528 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1529
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001530C API
1531-----
1532
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001533- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1534 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1535 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1536
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001537- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1538 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1539 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1540 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1541
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001542- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1543 generator objects.
1544
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001545- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1546 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001547 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1548 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001549
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001550- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1551 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1552
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001553- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1554 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1555 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1556 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1557 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1558
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001559- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1560 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1561 about 10% faster.
1562
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001563- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1564 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1565
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001566- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1567 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1568 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1569 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1570
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001571Windows
1572-------
1573
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001574- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1575 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1576 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1577 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1578
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001579- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1580 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1581 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1582
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001583
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001584What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1585===============================
1586
1587*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1588
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001589IDLE
1590----
1591
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001592- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1593 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1594 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1595 context-menu actions.
1596
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001597- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1598 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1599 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1600 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1601 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1602 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1603 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1604 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1605 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1606
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001607
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001608What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1609=============================================
1610
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001611*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001612
1613Core and builtins
1614-----------------
1615
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001616- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001617 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001618 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1619
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001620Extension modules
1621-----------------
1622
1623- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1624 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1625 than once. This has been fixed.
1626
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001627- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1628 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1629 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1630 call.
1631
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001632- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1633
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001634Library
1635-------
1636
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001637- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1638 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1639
1640- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1641 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1642 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1643 restored.
1644
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001645IDLE
1646----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001647
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001648- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001649
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001650Build
1651-----
1652
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001653- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1654 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1655
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001656C API
1657-----
1658
1659Windows
1660-------
1661
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001662- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1663 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1664
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001665- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1666
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001667Mac
1668---
1669
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001670- Various fixes to pimp.
1671
1672- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1673
1674- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1675 more problems than it solves.
1676
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001677
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001678What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1679=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001680
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001681*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1682
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001683Core and builtins
1684-----------------
1685
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001686- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1687 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1688
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001689- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1690 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001691 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001692
1693- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1694 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1695 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001696 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001697
1698- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1699 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001700
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001701- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1702 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1703 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1704
1705- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001706 770247.
1707
1708- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001709
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001710Extension modules
1711-----------------
1712
1713- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1714 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1715
1716- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1717
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001718- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1719
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001720- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1721 contained within the _strptime module.
1722
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001723- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1724 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1725
1726- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001727 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1728
1729- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1730 the find_class attribute, if present.
1731
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001732- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001733
1734 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1735 (SF bug 763298).
1736
1737 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001738 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1739 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1740 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001741
1742 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1743
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001744Library
1745-------
1746
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001747- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1748
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001749- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1750 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1751 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1752 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1753 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1754 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1755 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1756 or Tester().
1757
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001758- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1759 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1760 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1761 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1762 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1763 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1764 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1765 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1766 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001767
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001768 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001769
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001770- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1771 weren't before was an oversight.
1772
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001773- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1774 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1775
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001776- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1777 when there are no lines.
1778
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001779- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1780 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1781
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001782- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1783 to child processes.
1784
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001785- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1786
1787- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1788
1789- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1790 xmlrpclib.
1791
1792- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1793 responses.
1794
1795- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1796 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1797
1798- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1799 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1800 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1801
1802- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1803 used as patterns.
1804
1805- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1806 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1807 than Tk 8.3.
1808
1809- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1810
1811- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001812
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001813Tools/Demos
1814-----------
1815
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001816- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1817
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001818- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1819
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001820- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001821
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001822Build
1823-----
1824
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001825- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1826
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001827- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1828
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001829- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1830 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001831
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001832- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1833 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1834 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001835
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001836C API
1837-----
1838
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001839- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1840 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1841
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001842Windows
1843-------
1844
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001845- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1846 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1847 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1848 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1849 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1850 Python exception ::
1851
1852 thread.error: can't start new thread
1853
1854 is raised now.
1855
1856- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1857 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1858 instead of from DLL teardown.
1859
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001860Mac
1861---
1862
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001863- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001864 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001865 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1866 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1867 the executable in the bundle.
1868
1869- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001870
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001871- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1872
1873- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1874 on Panther.
1875
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001876What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1877================================
1878
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001879*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001880
1881Core and builtins
1882-----------------
1883
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001884- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1885 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1886 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1887 with the -i option.
1888
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001889- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1890 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1891
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001892- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1893 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1894
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001895- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1896 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1897 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1898 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1899 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1900 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1901 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1902 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1903 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1904 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1905 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1906 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1907 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001908
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001909- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1910 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1911 embedded in a lambda expression.
1912
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001913- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1914 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1915 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1916 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1917 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1918
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001919- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1920 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1921 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1922
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001923- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1924 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1925
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001926- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1927 It's writable again.
1928
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001929- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1930 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1931 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001932 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001933
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001934- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1935 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1936 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1937
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001938Extension modules
1939-----------------
1940
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001941- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1942 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1943
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001944- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1945 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1946 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1947 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1948
1949- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1950 collection.
1951
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001952- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1953 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1954 unique within a single program run.
1955
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001956- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1957 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1958
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001959- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1960 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1961
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001962- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1963 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001964
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001965- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1966
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001967- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1968 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1969
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001970- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1971 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1972 for many BSD-derived systems.
1973
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001974
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001975Library
1976-------
1977
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001978- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1979 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1980 primary ones:
1981
1982 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1983 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1984 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1985
1986 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1987 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1988 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1989 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1990 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1991 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1992
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001993- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1994 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1995 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1996 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1997 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1998 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1999 argument.
2000
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002001- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2002 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2003 in the archive.
2004
2005- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2006 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2007
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002008- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2009 569574).
2010
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002011- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2012 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2013 no more.
2014
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002015- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2016 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2017 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2018 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2019 code coverage.
2020
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002021- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2022 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2023 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002024 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2025 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002026
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002027- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2028 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2029 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002030 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002031
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002032- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2033
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002034- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2035 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2036 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2037 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2038
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002039- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2040 handling.
2041
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002042- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2043 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2044
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002045- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2046 in socket.py.
2047
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002048- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2049
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002050- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2051 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2052 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2053 opener with proxy support.
2054
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002055- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2056
2057- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2058
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002059Tools/Demos
2060-----------
2061
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002062- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2063
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002064- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2065
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002066- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2067 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002068
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002069- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2070 files.
2071
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002072Build
2073-----
2074
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002075- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002076 different root directory.
2077
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002078C API
2079-----
2080
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002081- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2082 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2083 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2084 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2085 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2086 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2087 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2088 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2089 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2090 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2091
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002092- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2093 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2094 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2095 from Python.
2096
2097
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002098New platforms
2099-------------
2100
2101None this time.
2102
2103Tests
2104-----
2105
2106- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2107 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2108
2109Windows
2110-------
2111
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002112- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2113
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002114- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2115 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2116 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2117 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2118 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2119 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2120 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2121 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2122 that's what it's for.
2123
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002124Mac
2125---
2126
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002127- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2128 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2129 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2130 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002131- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2132 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2133- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002134
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002135SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2136------------------------------------
2137
2138430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2139598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2140622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2141661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2142683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2143697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2144713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2145724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2146727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2147729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2148730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2149731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2150732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2151733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2152735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2153740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2154744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2155745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2156747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2157749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2158751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2159753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2160755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2161757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2162760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2163
2164
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002165What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2166================================
2167
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002168*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002169
2170Core and builtins
2171-----------------
2172
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002173- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2174 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2175
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002176- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2177 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2178 and cannot be strings).
2179
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002180- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2181 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2182 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2183 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2184
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002185- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2186 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2187 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2188 Python itself.
2189
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002190- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2191 the referenced object, if it has one.
2192
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002193- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2194 the thread started at
2195 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2196
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002197- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2198 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2199 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2200 placed on a list index.
2201
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002202- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2203 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2204 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2205 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2206
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002207- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2208 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2209 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2210 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2211 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2212 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2213 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2214
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002215- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2216 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2217 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2218 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2219 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2220
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002221- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2222 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002223
2224- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2225 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2226 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2227 #693195.)
2228
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002229- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2230 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002231
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002232- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002233 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002234 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2235 interpreter executions, would fail.
2236
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002237- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002238 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002239 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002240
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002241Extension modules
2242-----------------
2243
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002244- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2245 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2246 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2247 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2248
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002249- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2250 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2251
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002252- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2253 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2254 and Greg Chapman.)
2255
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002256- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2257 recursively.
2258
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002259- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002260 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2261 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2262 leaks.
2263
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002264- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2265
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002266- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2267 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2268 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2269 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2270 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2271 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2272 #705836.
2273
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002274- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002275 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2276
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002277- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2278 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2279 See SF bug #692416.
2280
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002281- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2282 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2283
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002284- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2285 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2286 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002287
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002288- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002289 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2290 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2291
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002292- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2293 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2294 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2295 timeouts to work properly.
2296
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002297Library
2298-------
2299
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002300- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2301 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2302 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2303 future release.
2304
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002305- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2306 for querying platform dependent features.
2307
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002308- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002309
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002310- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2311 pickle protocol versions.
2312
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002313- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2314 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2315 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2316
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002317- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2318
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002319- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2320 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2321 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2322 modules.
2323
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002324- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2325 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2326 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2327
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002328- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2329 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2330
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002331- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2332 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2333 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2334
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002335- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002336 MS Office extensions.
2337
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002338- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2339 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2340
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002341- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2342 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2343
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002344- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2345 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2346 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2347 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2348 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2349 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2350
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002351- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2352 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2353 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002354
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002355- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2356 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2357 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2358
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002359- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2360
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002361- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2362 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2363 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2364
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002365Tools/Demos
2366-----------
2367
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002368- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2369 See the module docstring for details.
2370
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002371Build
2372-----
2373
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002374- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2375 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002376
2377C API
2378-----
2379
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002380- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2381
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002382- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2383 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2384 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2385
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002386- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2387 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002388
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002389 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2390 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2391 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002392
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002393- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002394 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2395
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002396- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2397 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2398 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002399
2400New platforms
2401-------------
2402
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002403None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002404
2405Tests
2406-----
2407
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002408- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2409 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002410
2411Windows
2412-------
2413
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002414- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2415 function.
2416
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002417- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2418 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002419
2420Mac
2421---
2422
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002423- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2424 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002425
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002426- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2427 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002428
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002429- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2430 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2431 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002432
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002433- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002434 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2435 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002436
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002437- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2438 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002439
2440
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002441What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2442=================================
2443
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002444*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002445
2446Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002447-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002448
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002449- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2450 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2451 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2452
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002453- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2454 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2455 (SF patch #664376.)
2456
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002457- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2458 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2459 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2460 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2461 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2462 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002463 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002464
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002465- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2466 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2467 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2468 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002469 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002470
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002471- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2472 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2473 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2474 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2475 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2476 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2477 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2478 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2479 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2480 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2481 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2482
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002483- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2484 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2485 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2486 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2487 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2488 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2489
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002490- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2491 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2492
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002493- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2494 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2495 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2496 case.)
2497
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002498- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2499 passed as unicode strings.
2500
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002501- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2502 See SF bug #683467.
2503
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002504- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2505 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2506
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002507- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2508
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002509- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2510
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002511- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2512 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2513 arguments.
2514
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002515- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2516 See SF bug #667147.
2517
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002518- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002519 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002520 See SF bug #676155.
2521
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002522- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002523 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002524 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2525 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2526 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2527 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2528 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2529 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002530
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002531Extension modules
2532-----------------
2533
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002534- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2535 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2536 tp_as_number pointer.
2537
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002538- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2539 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2540 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2541 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2542 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2543
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002544- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2545
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002546- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2547
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002548- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002549 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002550 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2551 patch #678531.)
2552
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002553- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2554 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2555
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002556- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2557 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2558
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002559- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2560
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002561- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2562 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2563 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2564
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002565- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2566
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002567- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2568 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2569
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002570- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002571
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002572- datetime changes:
2573
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002574 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2575
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002576 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2577 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2578 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2579 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2580 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2581 now.
2582
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002583 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002584 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2585 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002586
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002587 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002588 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002589 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2590 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2591 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2592 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002593
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002594 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2595 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2596 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002597 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2598
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002599 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2600 by a later example coded by Guido.
2601
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002602 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002603 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2604 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2605 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002606 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2607 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2608
2609 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2610 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2611 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2612 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2613 tzinfo subclass instance.
2614
2615 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2616 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2617 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2618 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2619 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2620 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2621 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2622 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002623
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002624 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2625 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2626 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2627 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2628 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002629 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2630
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002631 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002632
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002633 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2634 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2635 as a naive datetime object.
2636
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002637 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2638 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2639 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2640
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002641 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2642 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2643 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2644 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2645 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2646 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2647 comparison.
2648
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002649 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2650 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2651 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2652 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002653 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002654
2655 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002656
2657 and ::
2658
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002659 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2660
2661 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2662 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2663 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2664 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2665
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002666 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2667 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2668 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2669 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2670 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2671
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002672 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2673 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002674 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2675 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002676
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002677Library
2678-------
2679
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002680- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2681 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2682
2683- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2684 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2685 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2686 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2687 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2688 See PEP 307 for details.
2689
2690- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2691 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2692
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002693- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2694 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002695 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002696 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2697 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002698 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002699
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002700- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2701 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2702
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002703- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2704 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2705 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2706
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002707- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2708
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002709- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2710 exception.
2711
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002712- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2713 class.
2714
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002715- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2716 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2717 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2718
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002719- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2720 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2721
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002722- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002723 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2724 See SF bug #659228.
2725
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002726- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2727 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2728 See SF patch #651082.
2729
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002730- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002731
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002732- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2733 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2734
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002735- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002736 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002737
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002738- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2739 DOS paths from other platforms.
2740
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002741Tools/Demos
2742-----------
2743
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002744- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2745 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2746 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2747 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2748 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2749 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2750 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2751 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2752 example:
2753
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002754 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2755 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002756
2757 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2758
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002759
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002760Build
2761-----
2762
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002763- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2764 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2765 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002766 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2767
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002768 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2769
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002770- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2771 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2772 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2773 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2774 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2775 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2776 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2777 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2778 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2779
2780- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2781 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2782 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2783 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2784
2785- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2786 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2787
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002788C API
2789-----
2790
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002791- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2792 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002793
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002794- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2795 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2796 tp_as_number pointer.
2797
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002798- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2799 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2800 (SF #681367)
2801
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002802- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2803 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2804 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2805 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002806
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002807Tests
2808-----
2809
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002810- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002811 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2812 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2813 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2814 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2815 pydoc.)
2816
2817- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2818
2819- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002820
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002821Windows
2822-------
2823
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002824- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2825 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2826 time).
2827
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002828- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2829 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2830
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002831- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2832 release without strong cryptography.
2833
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002834- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002835 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002836
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002837- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2838 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2839
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002840Mac
2841---
2842
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002843- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2844 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002845
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002846- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2847 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2848 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002849
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002850- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2851 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002852
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002853- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2854 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2855 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2856 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002857
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002858- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002859 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2860 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2861 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002862
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002863
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002864What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002865=================================
2866
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002867*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002868
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002869Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002870--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002871
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002872- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2873
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002874- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2875 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002876 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002877 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002878 a different meaning than before.
2879
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002880- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002881 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002882 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002883
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002884- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002885 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002886 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002887
2888- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2889 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2890 and deallocation.
2891
2892- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2893 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2894
2895- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2896 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2897 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2898 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2899 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2900
2901- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2902 now detected by the garbage collector.
2903
2904- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2905 [SF bug 519621]
2906
2907- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2908 identifier.
2909
2910- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2911 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2912 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2913 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2914 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2915 [SF bug 563060]
2916
2917- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2918 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2919 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2920 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2921 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2922
2923- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2924 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2925 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2926
2927- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2928
2929- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2930 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2931 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2932 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2933 state of the slots would be lost.)
2934
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002935Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002936-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002937
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002938- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002939 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2940 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2941 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2942 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002943 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2944 Jython 2.1.
2945
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002946- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002947 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002948 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2949 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2950 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2951 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2952 these, see PEP 302.
2953
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002954- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2955 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2956 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2957
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002958- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2959 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2960 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2961
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002962- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2963 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2964 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2965
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002966- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2967 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2968 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2969 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2970 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2971 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2972 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2973 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2974 releases or implementations.
2975
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002976- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002977 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2978 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002979
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002980- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2981 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2982
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002983- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2984 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2985 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2986
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002987- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2988 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2989
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002990- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2991 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002992 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2993 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002994
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002995- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2996 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2997 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2998 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2999 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3000
3001 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3002 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3003 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3004 pattern.
3005
3006 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3007 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3008 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3009 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3010
3011 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3012 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3013 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3014 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3015 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3016 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3017
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003018- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3019 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3020 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3021 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3022 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3023 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3024 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3025 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003026
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003027- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3028 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3029 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3030 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3031 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003032 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3033 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3034 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3035 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3036 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3037 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3038 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003039
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003040- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3041 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3042
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003043- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3044 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3045 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3046 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3047 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3048 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3049 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3050 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3051 to Zack Weinberg!
3052
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003053- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3054 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3055 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3056 type. This has been fixed now.
3057
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003058- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3059 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3060 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3061
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003062- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3063 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3064 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3065 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3066 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3067 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3068 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3069 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003070 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003071
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003072- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3073 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3074 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003075
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003076- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3077 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3078 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3079 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3080 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3081 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3082 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3083 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003084 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003085 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3086 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3087
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003088- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3089 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3090 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3091 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3092 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3093 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3094 this.)
3095
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003096- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3097 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003098 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003099 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003100 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3101 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003102 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3103 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003104
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003105- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3106 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3107 currently running.
3108
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003109- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3110 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3111 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3112 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3113
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003114- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3115 as directory names.
3116
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003117- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3118 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3119
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003120- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3121 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3122
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003123- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003124 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3125 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003126
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003127- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3128 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3129 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3130 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3131 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3132
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003133- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3134 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3135 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3136 removed.
3137
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003138- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3139 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3140 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3141
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003142- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3143 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3144 to __debug__.
3145
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003146- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3147 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3148 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3149
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003150- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3151 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3152 deprecated now.
3153
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003154- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3155 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3156 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003157
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003158- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3159 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3160 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3161 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3162 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003163
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003164- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3165 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3166
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003167- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3168 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3169 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003170 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003171 is backward compatible.
3172
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003173- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3174 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3175 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3176 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3177 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3178
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003179- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3180 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3181 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3182 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3183 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3184 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003185
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003186- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3187 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3188
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003189- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3190 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3191
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003192- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3193 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3194 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3195 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3196 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3197
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003198- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3199 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3200 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3201
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003202- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003203 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3204
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003205- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3206 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3207 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003208
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003209- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3210 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3211
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003212- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3213 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3214 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3215
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003216- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3217
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003218Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003219-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003220
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003221- Added three operators to the operator module:
3222 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3223 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3224 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3225
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003226- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3227
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003228- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3229 archives.
3230
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003231- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3232 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3233 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3234
3235 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3236
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003237- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3238 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3239 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003240 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003241
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003242- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3243 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3244 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3245 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003246 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3247 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3248 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3249 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003250
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003251- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3252 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003253
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003254- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3255
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003256- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3257 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3258
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003259- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3260 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3261 supported.
3262
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003263- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3264
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003265- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3266 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003267
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003268- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3269 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3270
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003271- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3272
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003273- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3274 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3275
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003276- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3277 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3278 functions but callable type objects.
3279
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003280- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003281 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003282 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003283
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003284- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3285 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003286
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003287- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3288 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003289
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003290- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3291 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3292 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3293 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3294
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003295- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3296 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003297
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003298- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3299 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3300 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3301 and __imul__.
3302
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003303- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003304 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3305 is called.
3306
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003307- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3308 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3309 interpreter was compiled.
3310
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003311- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3312 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3313 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003314 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003315 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3316 1, not 2.
3317
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003318- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3319 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3320 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3321 limit.
3322
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003323- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3324 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3325 bug #623464.
3326
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003327- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3328 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3329 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3330 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3331
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003332Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003333-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003334
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003335- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3336
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003337- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3338 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3339 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3340 with Python 2.3a2.
3341
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003342- os.path exposes getctime.
3343
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003344- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003345 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003346 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003347 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003348 unit tests of floating point results.
3349
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003350- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3351 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3352 has been increased.
3353
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003354- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3355 executed.
3356
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003357- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3358 postinstallation script.
3359
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003360- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3361 test the current module.
3362
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003363- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003364 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3365 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3366 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3367 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3368
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003369- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003370 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003371 Ward's Optik package.
3372
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003373- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3374 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3375 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3376 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3377
3378- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3379 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003380 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003381
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003382- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3383 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3384 shelf are binary pickles.
3385
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003386- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3387 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3388
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003389- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3390 modules are iterators now.
3391
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003392- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3393 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3394 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3395 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3396 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3397 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003398
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003399- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3400 with their entity value.
3401
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003402- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3403
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003404- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3405 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003406
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003407- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3408 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003409 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003410
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003411- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3412 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3413 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3414 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3415 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3416 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3417 main():
3418
3419 import locale
3420 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3421
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003422- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3423 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3424
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003425- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3426 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3427 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3428 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3429 to the new standard.
3430
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003431- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3432 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3433 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3434 an extension to the database.
3435
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003436- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3437 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3438 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3439 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003440 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003441
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003442- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003443 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003444
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003445- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3446 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3447 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3448 bounded integers.
3449
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003450- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3451 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3452 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3453 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3454 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3455 in existence.
3456
3457 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3458 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3459 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3460 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3461 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3462 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3463
3464 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3465 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3466 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3467 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3468
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003469- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3470 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3471 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3472
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003473- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3474
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003475- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3476 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3477 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3478 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3479
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003480- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3481 argument.
3482
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003483- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3484 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3485 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3486 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3487 [SF patch 560794].
3488
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003489- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3490 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3491 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003492 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3493 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3494 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003495
3496- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3497 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003498
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003499- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3500 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3501 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3502 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003503
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003504- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3505 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3506 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3507 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3508 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3509
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003510- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003511
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003512- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3513
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003514- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3515 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3516 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3517 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3518 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3519 identical to None.
3520
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003521- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3522 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3523 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3524 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3525 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3526 results now.
3527
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003528- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3529 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3530
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003531- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3532 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3533 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3534 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3535 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3536 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3537 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3538 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3539
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003540- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3541
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003542- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3543 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3544
3545- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3546 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3547 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3548 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3549 and other systems.
3550
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003551- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3552 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3553 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3554 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 +00003555 work well with these.
3556
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003557- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3558
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003559- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003560 connections.
3561
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003562- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3563 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3564 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3565
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003566- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3567 sets
3568
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003569- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3570 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3571 name.
3572
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003573- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3574 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3575 passed in.
3576
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003577- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003578 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003579 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3580 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003581
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003582- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3583
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003584- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3585
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003586- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3587 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3588 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3589
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003590- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3591 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3592 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3593 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003594 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003595
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003596- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003597 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003598 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003599
3600- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3601 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3602 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3603
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003604- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003605 the value of its expression argument.
3606
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003607- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3608 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3609 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3610
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003611- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3612 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3613 skipstone browser was included.
3614
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003615- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3616 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3617
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003618Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003619-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003620
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003621- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3622 names in addition to accepting file names.
3623
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003624- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3625 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3626 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3627 still used and useful.)
3628
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003629- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3630 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3631 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3632 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003633
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003634- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3635 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3636 the generated binary.
3637
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003638Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003639-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003640
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003641- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3642
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003643- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3644 except in the hands of experts.
3645
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003646- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003647 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3648 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3649 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003650
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003651- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3652 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3653 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3654 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3655 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3656 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3657 builds.
3658
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003659- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3660 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3661 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3662 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3663 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3664 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3665 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3666 new type.
3667
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003668- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003669
3670 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3671 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3672 positive infinities.
3673
3674 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3675 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3676 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3677 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3678 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3679 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3680 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3681
3682 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3683
3684 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3685
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003686- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3687 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3688 size of the executable.
3689
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003690- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3691 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3692 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3693 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003694
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003695- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3696
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003697- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3698 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3699 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003700
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003701- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3702 well as Unix.
3703
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003704- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3705 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3706 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3707 modules in the README file for details.
3708
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003709C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003710-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003711
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003712- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3713 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003714 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003715 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003716 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003717
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003718- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3719 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3720 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3721 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3722 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3723 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003724 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003725 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3726 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3727 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3728 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3729 aligned.)
3730
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003731- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3732 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3733 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3734
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003735- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3736 level.
3737
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003738- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3739 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3740 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3741 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3742 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3743
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003744- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3745 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3746 code.
3747
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003748- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3749 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3750 adjusting for negative indices.
3751
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003752- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3753 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3754 object.
3755
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003756- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3757 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3758 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3759
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003760- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3761 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003762
3763- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3764
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003765- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3766 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3767 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3768 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3769
3770- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3771
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003772- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003773
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003774- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003775 without going through the buffer API.
3776
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003777- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003778
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003779- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3780 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3781 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3782 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3783
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003784- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3785 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3786
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003787- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003788 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3789
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003790New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003791-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003792
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003793- OpenVMS is now supported.
3794
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003795- AtheOS is now supported.
3796
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003797- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3798
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003799- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3800
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003801Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003802-----
3803
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003804- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3805 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3806 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003807
3808Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003809-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003810
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003811- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3812 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3813 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3814 bugs.
3815 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003816 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003817 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3818 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003819 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003820
3821- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003822 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003823
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003824- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3825 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3826
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003827- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3828 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003829 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003830 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3831
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003832- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3833 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3834 use files" uninstall option).
3835
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003836- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3837
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003838- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3839 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3840
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003841- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3842 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3843 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3844
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003845- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3846 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3847 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3848 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3849 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003850 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3851 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3852 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003853
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003854- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003855 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003856 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3857 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3858 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3859 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3860 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3861 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3862 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3863 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3864 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3865 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3866 work around.
3867
3868- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3869 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3870 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3871 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3872 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3873 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3874 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3875 specified with O_CREAT too).
3876
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003877Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003878----
3879
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003880- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003881
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003882- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3883 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3884 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3885
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003886- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3887 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3888 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3889
3890- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3891 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3892 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3893 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3894 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3895 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3896 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3897 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003898
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003899- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3900 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3901 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003902
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003903- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3904 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3905 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3906 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3907 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003908
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003909- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3910 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3911 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003912
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003913- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3914 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003915
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003916- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3917 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3918 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3919 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3920 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003921
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003922- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3923 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3924 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3925
3926- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3927 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3928 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003929
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003930- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3931 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3932 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3933 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003934 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003935
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003936- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3937 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003938
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003939- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3940 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003941
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003942- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003943 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003944 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3945 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003946
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003947
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003948What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003949===============================
3950
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003951*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3952
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003953Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003954--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003955
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003956- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3957 with a custom metaclass.
3958
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003959Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003960-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003961
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003962- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3963 are proxies.
3964
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003965Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003966-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003967
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003968- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3969 very short strings.
3970
3971- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3972 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3973 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3974 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3975 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3976
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003977Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003978-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003979
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003980- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3981 close or delete time).
3982
3983- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3984 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3985
3986- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3987
3988- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003989 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003990
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003991Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003992-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003993
3994Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003995-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003996
3997C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003998-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003999
4000New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004001-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004002
4003Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004004-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004005
4006Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004007-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004008
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004009- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4010
4011- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4012 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4013
4014- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4015 deleted at process exit time.
4016
4017- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4018 in backslash.
4019
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004020Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004021----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004022
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004023- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4024 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4025 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4026
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004027
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004028What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004029===========================
4030
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004031*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4032
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004033Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004034--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004035
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004036- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4037 been extensively updated. See
4038
4039 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4040
4041 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4042
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004043- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4044 deleted!
4045
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004046- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4047 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4048 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4049 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4050 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4051
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004052- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4053
4054 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4055 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4056
4057 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4058 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4059 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4060 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4061 supported anyway.
4062
4063 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4064 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4065
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004066- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4067 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4068 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4069 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4070 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004071
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004072- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4073 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4074 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4075
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004076Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004077-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004078
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004079- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4080 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4081 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4082 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4083 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4084 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004085 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4086 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4087 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4088 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004089
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004090- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4091 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4092 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4093
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004094Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004095-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004096
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004097- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4098
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004099Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004100-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004101
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004102- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4103 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4104 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4105 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4106 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4107 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4108
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004109- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4110
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004111- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4112
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004113- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4114
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004115- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4116 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4117 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4118
4119- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4120
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004121Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004122-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004123
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004124- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4125 off a search on Google.
4126
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004127Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004128-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004129
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004130- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4131 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4132 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4133 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4134 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4135 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4136 other platforms should do likewise.
4137
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004138- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4139 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4140 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4141
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004142C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004143-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004144
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004145- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4146 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4147 producing key-value pairs.
4148
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004149- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004150 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004151 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4152 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4153 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4154 previously went unchallenged.
4155
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004156New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004157-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004158
4159Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004160-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004161
4162Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004163-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004164
4165Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004166----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004167
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004168- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4169 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004170
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004171- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4172 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4173 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4174 home.
4175
4176
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004177What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004178===========================
4179
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004180*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4181
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004182Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004183--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004184
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004185- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4186 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004187
4188 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004189 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004190
4191 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4192 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004193 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004194 This needs to be documented.
4195
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004196- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4197 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4198
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004199- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4200 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4201 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4202
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004203- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4204 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4205
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004206- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4207 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4208 class forbids it).
4209
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004210- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4211 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4212 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4213
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004214- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4215
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004216Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004217-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004218
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004219- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4220 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004221 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004222
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004223- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4224 (like 1 + '').
4225
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004226Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004227-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004228
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004229- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4230 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4231 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4232 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004233 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004234 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4235
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004236- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4237 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4238 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4239 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4240
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004241- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4242 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004243 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4244 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4245 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004246
4247- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4248 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004249
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004250- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4251 bytes on its input.
4252
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004253Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004254-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004255
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004256- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004257 convenience function.
4258
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004259- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4260 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4261 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004262 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4263 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4264 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4265 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4266 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4267 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004268
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004269- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4270 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4271 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4272 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4273
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004274- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4275 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4276 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4277
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004278- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4279 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4280 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4281 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4282
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004283- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4284 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004285 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004286 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4287 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4288 new -l and -e options.
4289
4290- statcache is now deprecated.
4291
4292- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4293 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004294 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004295 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4296 time properly taken into account.
4297
4298- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4299 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4300 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4301 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4302
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004303Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004304-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004305
4306Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004307-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004308
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004309- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4310 is built with libdb3 if available.
4311
4312- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4313
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004314C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004315-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004316
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004317- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4318 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4319 PySequence_Size().
4320
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004321- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4322
4323- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4324 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4325 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4326
4327- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4328 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4329
4330- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4331 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4332
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004333New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004334-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004335
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004336- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4337 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4338
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004339- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4340 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4341
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004342- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4343
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004344Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004345-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004346
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004347- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4348 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4349
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004350Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004351-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004352
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004353Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004354----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004355
4356- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4357 removed completely in the next release.
4358
4359- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4360 OSX.
4361
4362- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4363 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4364
4365- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4366
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004367
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004368What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004369===========================
4370
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004371*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4372
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004373Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004374--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004375
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004376- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004377 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004378 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004379 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4380 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004381 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4382 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004383 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4384 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004385
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004386- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4387 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4388
4389- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4390 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4391
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004392Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004393-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004394
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004395- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4396 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4397 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4398 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4399 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4400 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4401 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4402 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4403
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004404- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4405 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4406 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4407 example).
4408
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004409- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004410 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004411 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004412 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004413
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004414- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4415 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4416 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004417 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004418
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004419- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4420 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4421 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4422 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4423 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4424 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4425
4426 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4427
4428 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4429
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004430Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004431-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004432
4433- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4434
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004435- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4436
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004437- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4438 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004439
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004440- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4441 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4442 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4443 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4444 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4445 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004446 attributes.
4447
4448- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4449 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4450 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004451
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004452- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4453 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4454 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004455
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004456- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4457 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4458 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004459 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4460 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4461
4462- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4463 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004464
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004465Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004466-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004467
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004468- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4469 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4470
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004471- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4472 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4473 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4474 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4475
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004476- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4477 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4478 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4479 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4480
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004481 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4482 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4483 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4484 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4485 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4486 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4487 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4488 without losing information).
4489
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004490- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004491 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4492 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4493 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4494 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4495 module).
4496
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004497 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004498 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4499 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4500 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4501 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004502
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004503- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004504 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4505 encoding.
4506
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004507- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4508 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4509
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004510- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004511 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4512
4513- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4514 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4515 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4516 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4517
4518- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4519
4520- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4521 ON, and OFF.
4522
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004523- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4524 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4525
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004526Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004527-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004528
4529- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4530 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4531 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004532
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004533- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4534 been added: -X and -E.
4535
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004536Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004537-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004538
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004539- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4540 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4541
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004542C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004543-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004544
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004545- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4546 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4547 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4548 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4549 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4550
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004551- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4552 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4553 as long) arguments.
4554
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004555- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4556 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4557 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4558 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4559 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4560 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4561
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004562- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4563 input.
4564
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004565New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004566-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004567
4568Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004569-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004570
4571Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004572-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004573
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004574- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4575 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4576 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4577
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004578- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4579 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4580 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004581 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004582
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004583 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4584 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4585 import signal
4586 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004587
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004589 while 1:
4590 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004591 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004592 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4593 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4594 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4595 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004596
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004597
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004598What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4599===========================
4600
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004601*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4602
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004603Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004604--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004605
4606- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4607 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4608 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4609
4610- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4611 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4612 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4613 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4614 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4615 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4616 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004617
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004618- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004619 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004620 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4621 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4622 associate a docstring with a property.
4623
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004624- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4625 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4626 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4627 other built-in object types.
4628
4629- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4630 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4631 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4632 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4633 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4634
4635- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4636 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4637
4638- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4639 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004640 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004641 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4642 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4643 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4644 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4645 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4646
4647- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4648 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4649 class.
4650
4651- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4652 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4653 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4654 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4655
4656- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4657 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4658 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4659 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4660
4661- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4662 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4663
4664- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4665 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4666 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4667 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4668 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004669 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004670 with the same value as s.
4671
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004672- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4673
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004674Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004675----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004676
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004677- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4678
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004679- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4680 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4681 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4682 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4683 objects.
4684
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004685- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4686 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004687 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4688 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4689
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004690- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4691 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4692 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4693
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004694Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004695-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004696
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004697- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4698 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4699 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4700 by the instances.
4701
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004702- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4703 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4704 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4705
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004706- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4707 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4708 before the entire comparison is complete.
4709
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004710- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4711 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4712 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4713
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004714- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4715 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4716 getwriter().
4717
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004718- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4719 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4720
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004721- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004722 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4723 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4724
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004725- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4726 iterable object.
4727
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004728- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4729 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004730
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004731- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4732 authentication.
4733
4734- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4735 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004736
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004737- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004738 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4739 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4740 a sample driver.)
4741
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004742Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004743-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004744
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004745- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4746 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4747 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4748 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4749 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4750 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4751 kernel has large file support.
4752
4753- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4754 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4755 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4756 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4757 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4758
4759- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4760 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4761 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4762
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004763C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004764-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004765
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004766- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4767 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4768
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004769New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004770-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004771
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004772- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4773 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4774
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004775Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004776-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004777
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004778- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4779 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4780 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4781 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4782 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4783
4784- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4785 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4786 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4787 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4788
4789- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4790 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4791
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004792Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004793-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004794
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004795- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004796 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4797 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004798
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004799
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004800What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4801===========================
4802
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004803*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4804
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004805Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004806----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004807
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004808- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4809 big to represent as a C double.
4810
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004811- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4812 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4813 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4814 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4815 restriction).
4816
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004817- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4818 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4819 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4820 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4821 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4822
4823 >>> dir([])
4824 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4825 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4826 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4827 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4828 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4829 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4830 'reverse', 'sort']
4831
4832 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4833
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004834- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004835 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4836 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4837 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4838 OverflowError exception.
4839
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004840- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004841 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004842 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4843 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4844 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4845 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4846 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004847 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004848 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4849 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4850
4851 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4852 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4853 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4854 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004855
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004856- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004857 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4858 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4859 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4860 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4861 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4862 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4863 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4864 once it is created.
4865
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004866- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4867 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4868 (key, value) pairs.
4869
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004870- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004871 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4872 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4873
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004874- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4875 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4876 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4877 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4878 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004879
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004880- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004881 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4882 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4883
4884 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4885
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004886- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004887 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4888
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004889Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004890-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004891
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004892- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004893 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4894 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004895
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004896- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4897 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4898 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4899 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4900 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4901 in this area anymore).
4902
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004903- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4904 threading.Timer.
4905
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004906- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4907 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4908
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004909- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004910 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4911
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004912- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004913 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4914 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4915 converted to Python longs.
4916
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004917- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004918 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4919
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004920- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4921 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4922 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4923
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004924Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004925-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004926
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004927- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4928 division operators as per PEP 238.
4929
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004930Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004931-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004932
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004933- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4934 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4935 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4936 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4937
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004938C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004939-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004940
4941- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004942
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004943- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4944 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004945 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004946
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004947 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4948 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004949 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004950 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004951
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004952- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004953 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4954 module:
4955
4956 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004957
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004958 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4959 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004960
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004961 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4962 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004963
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004964 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4965
4966 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4967
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004968- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004969 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4970 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4971 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004972
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004973New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004974-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004975
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004976- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4977 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4978 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4979 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4980 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004981
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004982Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004983-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004984
4985Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004986-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004987
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004988- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4989 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4990 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4991 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004992 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4993 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4994 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4995 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4996 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004997
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004998- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004999 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5000
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005001
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005002What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5003===========================
5004
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005005*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5006
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005007Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005008-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005009
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005010- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5011 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5012
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005013- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5014 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5015 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005016
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005017- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5018 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5019 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5020 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005021
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005022- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5023
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005024- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005025
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005026Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005027-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005028
5029- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005030 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005031 the module docstring for details.
5032
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005033Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005034-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005035
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005036- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005037 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5038 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5039 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005040
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005041- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5042 Nick Mathewson.
5043
5044Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005045----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005046
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005047- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5048 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5049 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5050 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5051 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5052 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5053 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5054 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5055
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005056- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5057 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5058 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5059 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5060
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005061- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5062 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5063 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5064 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5065 come a long way).
5066
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005067- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5068 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5069 write filters for these warnings).
5070
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005071- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5072 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5073 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5074 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5075 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5076
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005077- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5078 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5079 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5080 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5081 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5082 older distribution.
5083
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005084Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005085-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005086
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005087- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5088 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005089 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005090
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005091- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5092 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5093 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5094
5095- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5096
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005097- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5098
5099- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5100
5101- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5102
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005103- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005104
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005105- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5106
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005107New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005108-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005109
5110C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005111-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005112
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005113- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5114 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5115 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5116 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5117 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5118 against buffer overruns.
5119
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005120- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005121 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5122 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005123 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5124 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5125 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5126
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005127- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5128 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5129 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5130 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5131 deprecated.
5132
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005133Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005134-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005135
5136- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5137 relevant is found.
5138
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005139
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005140What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005141===========================
5142
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005143*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5144
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005145Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005146----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005147
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005148- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5149 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5150 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5151 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5152 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5153 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5154 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5155 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005156 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005157 repaired.
5158
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005159- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005160 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005161 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5162 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5163 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5164 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5165 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5166 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5167 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5168 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5169
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005170- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5171 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5172 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5173 leading BMO character).
5174
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005175- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5176 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5177 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5178
5179 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5180 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5181 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005182
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005183 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5184 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5185 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5186 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5187 for various simple to use conversions.
5188
5189 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5190 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5191
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005192 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5193 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5194 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5195 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5196 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5197 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5198 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5199 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5200 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5201 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5202 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5203 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5204 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5205 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5206 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005207
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005208- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5209 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5210 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005211 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005212 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005213
5214 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005215 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5216 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5217 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5218 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5219 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005220 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5221 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005222
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005223 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5224 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5225 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005226 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005227
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005228- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5229 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5230 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5231 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5232 floating arithmetic,
5233
5234 x = 9007199254740992.0
5235 print long(x)
5236
5237 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5238 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5239 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5240 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5241 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5242 functions are of good quality).
5243
5244 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5245 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5246 algorithms to break.
5247
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005248- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5249 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5250 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5251 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5252 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5253 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5254 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5255 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5256 order.
5257
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005258- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5259 operation along the most common code paths.
5260
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005261- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5262 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5263
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005264- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5265 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5266 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5267 {}.update(UserDict())
5268
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005269- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5270 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5271 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5272 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5273 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5274 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5275 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5276 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5277
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005278- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005279 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005280
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005281 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005282 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5283 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005284 join() method of strings
5285 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005286 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5287 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005288 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005289 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005290
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005291- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5292 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5293
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005294- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5295 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5296
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005297- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5298 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5299 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5300 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5301
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005302- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5303 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005304 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005305 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5306 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005307
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005308- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5309
5310
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005311Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005312-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005313
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005314- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005315 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005316 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5317 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5318
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005319- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5320 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5321
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005322- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5323 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5324 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5325 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5326
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005327- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5328 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5329 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5330
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005331- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5332
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005333- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5334
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005335- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5336 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5337 that are still imported into string.py).
5338
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005339- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5340
5341- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5342 Now it does.
5343
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005344- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5345
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005346- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5347 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5348 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5349 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5350 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005351 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5352 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005353
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005354- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5355 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5356 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5357 'help(object)'.
5358
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005359Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005360-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005361
5362- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005363 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005364 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5365 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5366
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005367- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005368 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5369 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005370
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005371C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005372-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005373
5374- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5375 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005376
5377----
5378
5379**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**