blob: 278db44acc0c2ad99f286eadad7e81a1a1bdde11 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000015- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
16 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
17 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
18
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000019- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
20 configure would break checking curses.h.
21
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000022- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
23 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
24
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000025- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
26
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000027- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
28
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000029- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
30
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000031- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
32 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
33
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000034- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
35 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
36 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
37
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000038- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
39 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000040 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000041
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000042- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
43 now encodes backslash correctly.
44
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000045- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
46
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000047- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
48 and long longs.
49
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000050- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
51 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
52 message in this case.
53
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000054- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
55 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
56 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
57 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
58 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
59
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000060- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000061
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000062- Speed up some Unicode operations.
63
64- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
65
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000066- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000067 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
68
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000069- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
70
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000071- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
72 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
73
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000074- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
75
76- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
77
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000078- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
79 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
80 was empty.
81
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000082- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
83 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
84
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000085- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000086 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000087
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000088- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
89 codes.
90
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000091- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
92 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
93 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
94
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000095- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
96 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
97
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000098- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000099 (fixes bug #1119418).
100
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000101- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
102
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000103- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
104 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
105
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000106- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
107 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
108 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
109
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000110- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
111
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000112- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
113 reference counts in some error exit cases.
114
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000115- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
116 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
117 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
118 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
119 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
120 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
121 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
122 realloc.
123
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000124- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
125 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
126
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000127- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
128 like their int counterparts.
129
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000130- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
131 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
132 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
133 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
134 for a longer write-up of the problem).
135
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000136- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
137 serializing floats.
138
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000139- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
140 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
141 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
142
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000143- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
144 278.
145
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000146- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
147 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
148 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
149 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000150 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000151 PyNumber_*().
152 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
153
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000154- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
155 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
156 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
157 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
158
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000159- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
160 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
161 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
162 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
163 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
164
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000165- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
166 disabled caused a crash.
167
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000168- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
169 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
170
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000171- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000172 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
173
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000174- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
175
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000176- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000177 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
178 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
179 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000180
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000181- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
182
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000183- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
184 returning None.
185
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000186- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000187 ('\') with a specific error message.
188
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000189- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
190
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000191- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
192 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
193
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000194- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000195 an ferror() call.
196
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000197- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
198 list.sort().
199
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000200- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
201 (2+3) --> (5).
202
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000203- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
204
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000205- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
206 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000207
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000208- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
209 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
210 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
211
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000212- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
213 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
214 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
215
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000216Extension Modules
217-----------------
218
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000219- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
220 before the env.
221
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000222- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
223
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000224- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
225
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000226- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
227 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
228 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
229
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000230- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
231 without prior setting of the userptr.
232
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000233- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
234
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000235- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
236
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000237- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
238 problem on AIX.
239
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000240- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
241
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000242- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
243
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000244- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
245
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000246- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
247 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
248
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000249- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
250 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
251
252- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
253
254- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000255
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000256- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
257 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
258
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000259- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
260
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000261- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
262 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
263
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000264- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
265 returns in cStringIO.c.
266
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000267- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
268 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
269
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000270- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
271
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000272- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
273
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000274- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
275 the file system encoding.
276
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000277- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
278 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000279
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000280- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
281
282- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000283 line without newlines.
284
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000285- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
286 on Windows.
287
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000288- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000289 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
290
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000291- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
292 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
293 for large or negative values.
294
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000295- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000296 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000297
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000298- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
299
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000300- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
301 if available on the platform.
302
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000303- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
304 available on the platform.
305
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000306- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
307 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
308
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000309- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
310
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000311- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
312 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
313 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
314
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000315- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
316
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000317- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
318 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
319
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000320- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000321 file size.
322
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000323- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
324
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000325- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
326 {remove_history,replace_history}
327
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000328- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
329 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000330
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000331- stat_float_times is now True.
332
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000333- array.array objects are now picklable.
334
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000335- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
336 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
337
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000338- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
339 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
340 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
341
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000342- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
343 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000344
345Library
346-------
347
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000348- Patch #1349118: urllib2 now supports user:pass@ style proxy
349 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
350 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
351
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000352- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
353
354- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000355
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000356- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
357
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000358- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000359 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000360
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000361- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
362 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000363
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000364- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
365
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000366- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
367
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000368- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
369 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
370 LoadError subclasses IOError.
371
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000372- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000373 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
374 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
375 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
376 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
377
378 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
379 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
380 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
381 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
382 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000383
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000384- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
385 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
386 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
387
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000388- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
389
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000390- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
391
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000392- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
393 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
394 illegal argument)
395
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000396- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
397 is an error in the format string.
398
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000399- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
400
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000401- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000402 "parent" argument.
403
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000404- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
405 for padding.
406
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000407- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
408 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
409
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000410- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
411 to get the correct encoding.
412
413- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
414 languages.
415
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000416- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
417
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000418- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
419
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000420- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
421
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000422- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
423 functionality.
424
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000425- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
426
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000427- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
428 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
429
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000430- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
431 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
432 match the Content-Length header.
433
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000434- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
435
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000436- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
437 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000438 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000439
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000440- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
441
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000442- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
443
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000444- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
445 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
446
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000447- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
448 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
449 Tkdnd.
450
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000451- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
452 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
453
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000454- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
455 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
456
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000457- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000458 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
459
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000460- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
461 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
462
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000463- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
464 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
465
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000466- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000467 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000468
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000469- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
470
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000471- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
472 error messages.
473
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000474- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
475
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000476- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
477 Bug #1224621.
478
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000479- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
480 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
481 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
482 terminates by raising StopIteration.
483
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000484- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
485
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000486- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
487 component of the path.
488
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000489- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
490 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
491 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
492 class at all.
493
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000494- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
495 files to PyPI.
496
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000497- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
498 them to PyPI.
499
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000500- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
501 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
502 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
503 work as expected.
504
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000505- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
506 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
507
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000508- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000509 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
510
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000511- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
512
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000513- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
514 to build.
515
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000516- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
517 symbolic links on Windows.
518
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000519- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000520 profile.py if available.
521
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000522- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
523
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000524- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
525 in LWPCookieJar.
526
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000527- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
528
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000529- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
530
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000531- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
532
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000533- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
534
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000535- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
536
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000537- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
538
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000539- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
540
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000541- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
542
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000543- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
544 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
545 be exploited in various ways.
546
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000547- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000548 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
549
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000550- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
551 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
552
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000553- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000554 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
555
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000556- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
557
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000558- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
559
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000560- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
561
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000562- Enhancements to the csv module:
563
564 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000565 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000566 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000567 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
568 reporting.
569 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
570 dictates.
571 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000572 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000573 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000574 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
575 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000576 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
577 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000578 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000579 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
580 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
581 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
582 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
583 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
584 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
585 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
586 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
587 without first creating a dialect class.
588 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
589 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
590 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000591 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000592 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
593 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000594 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
595 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
596 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
597 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000598 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
599 This has been fixed.
600
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000601- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
602 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
603 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
604 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
605
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000606- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
607
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000608- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
609 (Bug #951915).
610
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000611- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
612 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
613 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000614 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000615
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000616- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
617
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000618- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
619 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
620
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000621- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
622
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000623- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
624
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000625- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
626
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000627- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
628
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000629- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
630
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000631- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
632 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
633 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
634
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000635- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000636 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000637
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000638- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
639 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
640 tokenizer with very long source lines.
641
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000642- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
643 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
644 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000645
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000646- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
647 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000648
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000649- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
650 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
651
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000652- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
653 correctly.
654
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000655- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
656 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
657 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
658 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
659 between two lines.
660
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000661- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
662 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
663 handlers.
664
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000665- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000666 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
667 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000668
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000669- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
670 considering it exactly like a '*'.
671
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000672- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
673 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000674
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000675- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
676
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000677Build
678-----
679
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000680- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
681
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000682- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
683 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
684
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000685- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
686
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000687- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
688 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
689
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000690- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
691 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
692
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000693- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
694 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
695 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000696 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000697
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000698- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
699 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
700 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
701
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000702- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
703
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000704- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
705 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
706
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000707- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
708 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
709 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
710 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
711 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
712 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
713 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
714 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
715
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000716- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
717 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
718 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
719 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
720
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000721C API
722-----
723
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000724- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
725
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000726- Removed PyRange_New().
727
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000728- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
729 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
730 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
731 mappings.
732
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000733
734Tests
735-----
736
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000737- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000738
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000739- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
740 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
741
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000742
743Documentation
744-------------
745
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000746- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
747
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000748- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
749 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
750
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000751- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
752
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000753- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
754
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000755- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
756
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000757- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
758
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000759- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
760
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000761- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
762
763- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
764
765- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
766
767- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
768
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000769- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
770 Closes bug #1166582.
771
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000772- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
773 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
774 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
775
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000776Mac
777---
778
779
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000780New platforms
781-------------
782
783- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
784
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000785
786Tools/Demos
787-----------
788
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000789- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
790 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
791 source files that need an encoding declaration.
792 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
793
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000794- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
795
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000796- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000797
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000798- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
799 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000800
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000801What's New in Python 2.4 final?
802===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000803
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000804*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000805
806Core and builtins
807-----------------
808
809- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
810 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
811 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
812
813
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000814What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
815==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000816
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000817*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000818
819Core and builtins
820-----------------
821
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000822- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
823 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
824 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
825
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000826
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000827Library
828-------
829
830- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
831 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
832 raised is re-raised.
833
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000834- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
835 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
836
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000837- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
838 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
839 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
840 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
841 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
842 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
843 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
844 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
845 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
846 by the slice are recomputed now.
847
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000848- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000849
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000850Build
851-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000852
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000853- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
854 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
855 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000856
857C API
858-----
859
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000860- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
861
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000862
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000863What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
864================================
865
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000866*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000867
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000868License
869-------
870
871The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
872is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
873changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
874Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
875intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
876durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
877the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
878License::
879
880 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
881
882says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
883to Python 2.1.1.
884
885The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
886License Version 2.
887
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000888Core and builtins
889-----------------
890
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000891- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
892 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
893 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
894 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
895 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
896 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
897 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000898 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000899 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
900 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
901
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000902- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000903
904Extension Modules
905-----------------
906
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000907- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
908 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
909 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
910 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000911
912Library
913-------
914
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000915- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
916 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
917 returned.
918
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000919- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
920
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000921- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
922 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
923
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000924- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
925
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000926- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
927 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000928
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000929- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
930
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000931- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
932
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000933- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000934 the source code is updated and reloaded.
935
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000936Build
937-----
938
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000939- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000940
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000941What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
942================================
943
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000944*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000945
946Core and builtins
947-----------------
948
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000949- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000950 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
951
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000952- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
953 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
954 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
955 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
956
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000957- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
958 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
959
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000960- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
961 constant.
962
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000963- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
964 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
965 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
966 large), and to anomalies such as
967 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
968 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
969 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
970 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000971
972Extension modules
973-----------------
974
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000975- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
976 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000977 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
978 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
979 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000980
981Library
982-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000983
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000984- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000985 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000986 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
987 --swig-cpp.
988
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000989- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
990 it is set.
991
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000992- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000993
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000994- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
995 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
996 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
997 Closes bug #1039270.
998
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000999- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001000
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001001 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001002 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1003 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1004 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1005 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1006 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1007 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1008 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1009 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1010 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1011 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1012 + Updates to documentation.
1013
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001014- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1015 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1016 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1017 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1018
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001019- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001020
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001021- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1022 applications should use the getmember function.
1023
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001024- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1025
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001026- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1027 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1028 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1029 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1030 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1031 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1032 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1033 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1034 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1035
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001036- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1037 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001038 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001039
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001040- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1041 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1042 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1043 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1044 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1045 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1046 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1047 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001048
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001049- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1050 the new public features (of which there are many).
1051
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001052- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001053 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1054 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1055 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1056 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001057 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001058
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001059- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1060
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001061- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1062 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1063 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1064 options.
1065
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001066- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1067 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1068 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1069 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1070 conditions under which non-string values work.
1071
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001072Build
1073-----
1074
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001075- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1076 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1077 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1078
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001079- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1080 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1081 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1082 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1083 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001084
1085C API
1086-----
1087
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001088- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1089 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1090
1091- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1092
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001093- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1094 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1095 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1096 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1097 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1098 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1099 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1100 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1101 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1102
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001103- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1104
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001105- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1106 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1107 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001108
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001109Tests
1110-----
1111
1112- test__locale ported to unittest
1113
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001114Mac
1115---
1116
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001117- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1118 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1119 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001120
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001121Tools/Demos
1122-----------
1123
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001124- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1125 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1126 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1127 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1128 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001129
1130
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001131What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1132=================================
1133
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001134*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001135
1136Core and builtins
1137-----------------
1138
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001139- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001140 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1141
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001142- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1143 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1144 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1145 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1146 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1147 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1148 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1149 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001150 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1151 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1152 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1153 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1154 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001155
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001156- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1157 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1158 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1159 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1160 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1161
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001162- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1163
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001164- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1165 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1166
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001167- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1168 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1169 modified the list.
1170
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001171- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1172 functions is now writable.
1173
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001174- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1175 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1176 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1177 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1178
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001179- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1180 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1181 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1182 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1183 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001184
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001185- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1186 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1187
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001188Extension modules
1189-----------------
1190
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001191- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1192
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001193- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1194 data.
1195
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001196- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1197 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1198 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1199 supposed to have been truncated away.
1200
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001201- Added socket.socketpair().
1202
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001203- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1204 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1205
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001206- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001207 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1208
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001209Library
1210-------
1211
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001212- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001213 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001214
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001215- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1216 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1217
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001218- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1219 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1220
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001221- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1222
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001223- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1224 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001225
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001226- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1227 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1228
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001229- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1230
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001231- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1232
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001233- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1234
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001235- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1236 Percivall.
1237
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001238- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1239 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1240
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001241- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1242 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1243 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001244 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001245
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001246- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1247 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1248 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1249 and exponent.
1250
1251- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1252
1253- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001254 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001255 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1256
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001257- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1258 to the readline module.
1259
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001260- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001261 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1262 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001263
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001264- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1265 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1266 contains symlinks.
1267
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001268- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1269 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1270
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001271- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1272 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1273 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1274
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001275- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1276 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1277 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1278 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1279 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1280 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1281 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1282 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1283 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1284 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1285 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1286 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1287 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1288
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001289- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1290
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001291Tools/Demos
1292-----------
1293
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001294- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1295 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1296
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001297- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1298
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001299Build
1300-----
1301
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001302- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1303 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1304 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1305 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1306 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1307 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1308 plans to do so.
1309
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001310- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1311 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1312
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001313- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1314 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1315
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001316- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1317 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1318
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001319- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1320 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1321
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001322- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1323 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1324
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001325C API
1326-----
1327
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001328..
1329
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001330Documentation
1331-------------
1332
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001333- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1334 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1335
1336- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1337 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1338 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001339
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001340New platforms
1341-------------
1342
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001343- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1344
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001345Tests
1346-----
1347
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001348..
1349
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001350Windows
1351-------
1352
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001353- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1354 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1355 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1356 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1357 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1358 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1359 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1360 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1361 the problem.
1362
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001363Mac
1364---
1365
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001366..
1367
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001368
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001369What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1370=================================
1371
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001372*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001373
1374Core and builtins
1375-----------------
1376
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001377- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1378 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1379 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1380 sensitive code.
1381
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001382- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001383 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001384
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001385 @staticmethod
1386 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001387
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001388 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001389
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001390- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1391 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1392 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1393 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1394 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1395 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1396 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1397 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1398 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1399 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1400 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1401
1402 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1403 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1404 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1405 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1406 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1407 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1408 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1409
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001410- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1411 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1412
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001413- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001414 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001415
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001416- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001417 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001418 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1419
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001420- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001421 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1422 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1423
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001424- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1425 types that support garbage collection.
1426
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001427- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1428
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001429- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1430 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1431 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1432 Jython.
1433
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001434- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1435
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001436- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1437 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1438
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001439- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1440 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1441 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001442
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001443- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1444 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1445 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1446
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001447Extension modules
1448-----------------
1449
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001450- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1451
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001452Library
1453-------
1454
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001455- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1456 TIS-620
1457
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001458- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1459 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1460 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1461 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1462 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1463 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1464 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1465 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1466 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1467 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1468
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001469- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1470
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001471- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1472 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1473 same as when the argument is omitted).
1474 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1475
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001476- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1477
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001478- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1479 schemes are offered.
1480
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001481- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1482
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001483- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1484 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1485 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1486
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001487- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1488
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001489- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1490 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1491
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001492- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1493 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1494 when dummy_threading is being used.
1495
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001496- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1497 from a tarfile.
1498
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001499- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001500 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001501
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001502- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1503 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1504 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1505 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1506
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001507- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1508 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1509
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001510- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1511 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1512 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1513 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1514 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1515 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1516 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1517 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1518 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1519 by some other method in progress).
1520
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001521- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1522 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1523 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001524
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001525- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1526
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001527- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1528 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1529 AM Kuchling.
1530
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001531- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1532 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1533 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1534
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001535- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1536 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1537 instead of unsigned.
1538
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001539- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001540 no longer part of the public API.
1541
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001542- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1543 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1544 string methods of the same name).
1545
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001546- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001547 SF patch 945642.
1548
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001549- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1550
1551 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1552
1553 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1554 DocTestSuites.
1555
1556- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1557 that provide thread-local data.
1558
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001559- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1560 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1561
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001562- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1563
1564- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1565 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1566 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1567
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001568- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1569
1570 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1571 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1572 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001573
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001574 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1575 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1576 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1577 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1578
1579 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1580 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1581
1582 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1583 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1584 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1585 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1586
1587 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1588 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1589 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1590 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1591 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1592
1593 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1594 wrapping help output.
1595
1596 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1597 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1598 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001599
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001600C API
1601-----
1602
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001603- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1604 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1605 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1606 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1607 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1608 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1609 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1610 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1611 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1612 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1613 its visible semantics have not changed.
1614
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001615- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1616 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1617
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001618Documentation
1619-------------
1620
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001621- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001622
1623 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001624 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001625
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001626 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001627
1628 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1629
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001630- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001631
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001632Tests
1633-----
1634
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001635- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001636 platforms that use the Makefile.
1637
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001638- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1639 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1640 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1641
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001642
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001643What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1644=================================
1645
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001646*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001647
1648Core and builtins
1649-----------------
1650
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001651- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1652 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1653 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1654 objects now (one object instead of three).
1655
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001656- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1657 Windows DLLs.
1658
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001659- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1660 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001661
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001662- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1663 a new .pyc magic.
1664
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001665- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1666 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1667 be there.
1668
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001669- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1670 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1671 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1672
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001673- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1674 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1675 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1676
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001677- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1678
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001679- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1680 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1681 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001682
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001683- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1684 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1685
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001686- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1687
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001688- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001689 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001690
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001691- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1692
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001693- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1694
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001695- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1696 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1697
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001698- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1699 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1700 Fixes bug #858016 .
1701
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001702- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1703 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1704 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1705
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001706- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1707 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1708 improves their performance (about 35%).
1709
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001710- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1711 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1712 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1713
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001714- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1715 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1716 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1717 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1718
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001719- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1720 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001721 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001722 length is not known).
1723
1724- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1725 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001726 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1727 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001728 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1729
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001730- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1731 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1732
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001733- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1734 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1735 keyword arguments.
1736
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001737- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1738 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1739 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1740
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001741- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1742 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1743 cases.
1744
1745- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1746 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1747 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1748 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1749 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1750 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1751 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1752 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1753 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1754 a release build.
1755
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001756- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1757 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1758
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001759- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001760 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001761
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001762- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1763 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1764 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1765 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1766 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1767 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1768 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1769 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1770 destroyed.
1771
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001772- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1773 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1774 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1775 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1776 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1777 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1778 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1779 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1780
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001781- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1782 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1783 character other than a space.
1784
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001785- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1786 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1787 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1788 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1789 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1790 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1791 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1792 attributes with the same name.
1793
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001794- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1795 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1796 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1797 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1798 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1799 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1800 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1801 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1802 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1803 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1804 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1805 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1806 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1807 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001808
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001809- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1810 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1811 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1812 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1813 This has been repaired.
1814
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001815- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1816
1817- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1818
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001819- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1820 over a sequence.
1821
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001822- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001823 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001824
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001825- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1826
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001827- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1828 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1829 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1830 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1831 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1832 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1833 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1834 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1835
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001836- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1837 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1838 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1839
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001840- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1841 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1842 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1843 freelist.
1844
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001845- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1846 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1847
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001848- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1849 number.
1850
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001851- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1852 a TypeError exception.
1853
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001854- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1855 820195.
1856
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001857- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1858 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1859 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1860
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001861- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001862 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1863 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001864
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001865- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1866 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1867 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1868
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001869- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1870 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001871 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001872
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001873- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001874 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1875 the first call.
1876
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001877
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001878Extension modules
1879-----------------
1880
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001881- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1882 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1883
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001884- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1885 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1886 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1887 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1888 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1889 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1890 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001891
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001892- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1893
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001894- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1895
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001896- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1897 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1898
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001899- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1900 fewer false positives.
1901
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001902- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1903 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1904
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001905- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001906 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1907
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001908- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001909 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001910 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001911 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1912 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001913
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001914- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1915 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1916 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1917 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1918
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001919- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1920 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1921 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1922 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1923 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1924 #897625.
1925
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001926- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1927 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1928
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001929- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1930 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1931 and pops on either side of the deque.
1932
1933- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1934 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1935
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001936- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1937 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1938 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1939 other functions that expect a function argument.
1940
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001941- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1942
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001943- os.getsid was added.
1944
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001945- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1946 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1947 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1948
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001949- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1950
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001951- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1952
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001953- readline.clear_history was added.
1954
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001955- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1956
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001957- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1958
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001959- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1960
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001961- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1962
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001963- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1964
1965- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1966
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001967- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1968
1969- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1970
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001971- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1972 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1973 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1974
1975- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1976 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1977 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1978 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1979 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1980 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1981 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1982
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001983- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1984 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1985 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1986 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001987
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001988- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001989 iterators from a single iterable.
1990
1991- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1992 of raising a TypeError exception.
1993
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001994- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1995 as parameter.
1996
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001997Library
1998-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001999
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002000- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2001
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002002- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2003 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2004 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002005
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002006- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2007 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2008 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002009
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002010- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002011
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002012- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2013 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002014
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002015- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2016 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2017
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002018- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2019
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002020- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002021 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002022
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002023- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002024 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002025
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002026- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2027
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002028- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2029 on cygwin and mingw32.
2030
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002031- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2032
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002033- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2034 module.
2035
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002036- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2037 installation scheme for all platforms.
2038
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002039- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002040 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002041
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002042- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2043 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2044 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2045
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002046- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2047 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2048 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2049
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002050- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2051
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002052- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2053
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002054- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2055 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2056
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002057- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2058 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2059 type pattern with the same value exists.
2060
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002061- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2062 when run from the command prompt).
2063
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002064- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2065 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2066
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002067- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2068 default sort).
2069
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002070- Added global runctx function to profile module
2071
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002072- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2073
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002074- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2075
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002076- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2077
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002078- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002079 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2080 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2081 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2082 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2083 accordingly.
2084
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002085- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2086 decoding standards.
2087
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002088- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2089 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2090 called for all requests.
2091
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002092- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2093 they are passed to the compiler.
2094
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002095- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2096 indent, width and depth.
2097
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002098- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2099 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2100
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002101- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2102 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2103
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002104- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2105
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002106- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2107
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002108- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2109
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002110- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2111 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2112
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002113- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002114 for better performance.
2115
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002116- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002117
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002118- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2119 a string).
2120
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002121- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2122
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002123- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2124
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002125- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2126
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002127- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2128
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002129- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2130 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2131 list of fieldnames.
2132
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002133- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2134 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2135
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002136- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2137
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002138- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2139 empty lists.
2140
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002141- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2142 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2143 and shelves.
2144
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002145- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2146 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2147
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002148- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002149 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2150 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002151
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002152- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2153 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002154 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002155
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002156- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002157 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2158 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2159
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002160- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2161 and removed in Py2.4.
2162
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002163- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2164
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002165- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2166
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002167Tools/Demos
2168-----------
2169
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002170- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2171 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2172
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002173- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2174
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002175- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2176 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2177 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2178 destination in situations where both files are given.
2179
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002180- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2181 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2182 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2183 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2184
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002185- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2186
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002187- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2188 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2189 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2190 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2191 now.
2192
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002193- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2194 in effect
2195
2196- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2197 C-c C-h
2198
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002199- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2200 -d option was given.
2201
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002202Build
2203-----
2204
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002205- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2206 build under OS X.
2207
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002208- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2209 --enable-profiling.
2210
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002211- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2212 is configured --with-tsc.
2213
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002214- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2215 on AMD64.
2216
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002217- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2218 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2219
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002220- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2221 removed.
2222
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002223- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2224 supported (see PEP 11).
2225
2226- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2227
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002228- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2229
2230- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2231 (see PEP 11).
2232
2233- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2234 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2235
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002236C API
2237-----
2238
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002239- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2240 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2241 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2242
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002243- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2244 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2245 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2246 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2247
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002248- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2249 generator objects.
2250
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002251- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2252 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002253 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2254 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002255
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002256- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2257 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2258
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002259- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2260 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2261 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2262 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2263 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2264
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002265- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2266 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2267 about 10% faster.
2268
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002269- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2270 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2271
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002272- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2273 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2274 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2275 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2276
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002277Windows
2278-------
2279
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002280- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2281 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2282 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2283 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2284
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002285- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2286 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2287 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2288
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002289
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002290What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2291===============================
2292
2293*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2294
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002295IDLE
2296----
2297
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002298- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2299 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2300 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2301 context-menu actions.
2302
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002303- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2304 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2305 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2306 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2307 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2308 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2309 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2310 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2311 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2312
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002313
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002314What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2315=============================================
2316
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002317*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002318
2319Core and builtins
2320-----------------
2321
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002322- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002323 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002324 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2325
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002326Extension modules
2327-----------------
2328
2329- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2330 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2331 than once. This has been fixed.
2332
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002333- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2334 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2335 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2336 call.
2337
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002338- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2339
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002340Library
2341-------
2342
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002343- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2344 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2345
2346- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2347 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2348 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2349 restored.
2350
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002351IDLE
2352----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002353
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002354- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002355
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002356Build
2357-----
2358
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002359- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2360 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2361
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002362C API
2363-----
2364
2365Windows
2366-------
2367
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002368- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2369 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2370
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002371- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2372
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002373Mac
2374---
2375
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002376- Various fixes to pimp.
2377
2378- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2379
2380- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2381 more problems than it solves.
2382
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002383
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002384What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2385=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002386
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002387*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2388
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002389Core and builtins
2390-----------------
2391
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002392- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2393 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2394
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002395- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2396 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002397 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002398
2399- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2400 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2401 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002402 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002403
2404- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2405 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002406
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002407- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2408 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2409 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2410
2411- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002412 770247.
2413
2414- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002415
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002416Extension modules
2417-----------------
2418
2419- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2420 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2421
2422- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2423
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002424- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2425
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002426- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2427 contained within the _strptime module.
2428
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002429- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2430 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2431
2432- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002433 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2434
2435- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2436 the find_class attribute, if present.
2437
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002438- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002439
2440 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2441 (SF bug 763298).
2442
2443 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002444 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2445 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2446 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002447
2448 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2449
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002450Library
2451-------
2452
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002453- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2454
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002455- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2456 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2457 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2458 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2459 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2460 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2461 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2462 or Tester().
2463
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002464- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2465 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2466 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2467 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2468 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2469 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2470 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2471 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2472 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002473
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002474 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002475
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002476- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2477 weren't before was an oversight.
2478
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002479- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2480 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2481
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002482- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2483 when there are no lines.
2484
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002485- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2486 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2487
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002488- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2489 to child processes.
2490
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002491- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2492
2493- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2494
2495- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2496 xmlrpclib.
2497
2498- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2499 responses.
2500
2501- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2502 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2503
2504- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2505 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2506 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2507
2508- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2509 used as patterns.
2510
2511- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2512 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2513 than Tk 8.3.
2514
2515- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2516
2517- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002518
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002519Tools/Demos
2520-----------
2521
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002522- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2523
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002524- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2525
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002526- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002527
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002528Build
2529-----
2530
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002531- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2532
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002533- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2534
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002535- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2536 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002537
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002538- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2539 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2540 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002541
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002542C API
2543-----
2544
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002545- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2546 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2547
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002548Windows
2549-------
2550
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002551- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2552 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2553 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2554 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2555 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2556 Python exception ::
2557
2558 thread.error: can't start new thread
2559
2560 is raised now.
2561
2562- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2563 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2564 instead of from DLL teardown.
2565
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002566Mac
2567---
2568
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002569- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002570 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002571 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2572 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2573 the executable in the bundle.
2574
2575- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002576
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002577- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2578
2579- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2580 on Panther.
2581
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002582What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2583================================
2584
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002585*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002586
2587Core and builtins
2588-----------------
2589
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002590- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2591 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2592 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2593 with the -i option.
2594
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002595- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2596 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2597
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002598- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2599 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2600
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002601- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2602 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2603 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2604 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2605 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2606 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2607 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2608 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2609 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2610 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2611 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2612 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2613 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002614
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002615- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2616 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2617 embedded in a lambda expression.
2618
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002619- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2620 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2621 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2622 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2623 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2624
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002625- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2626 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2627 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2628
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002629- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2630 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2631
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002632- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2633 It's writable again.
2634
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002635- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2636 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2637 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002638 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002639
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002640- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2641 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2642 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2643
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002644Extension modules
2645-----------------
2646
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002647- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2648 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2649
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002650- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2651 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2652 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2653 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2654
2655- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2656 collection.
2657
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002658- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2659 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2660 unique within a single program run.
2661
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002662- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2663 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2664
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002665- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2666 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2667
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002668- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2669 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002670
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002671- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2672
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002673- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2674 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2675
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002676- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2677 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2678 for many BSD-derived systems.
2679
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002680
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002681Library
2682-------
2683
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002684- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2685 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2686 primary ones:
2687
2688 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2689 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2690 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2691
2692 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2693 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2694 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2695 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2696 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2697 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2698
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002699- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2700 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2701 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2702 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2703 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2704 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2705 argument.
2706
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002707- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2708 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2709 in the archive.
2710
2711- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2712 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2713
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002714- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2715 569574).
2716
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002717- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2718 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2719 no more.
2720
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002721- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2722 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2723 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2724 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2725 code coverage.
2726
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002727- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2728 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2729 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002730 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2731 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002732
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002733- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2734 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2735 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002736 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002737
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002738- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2739
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002740- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2741 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2742 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2743 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2744
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002745- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2746 handling.
2747
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002748- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2749 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2750
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002751- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2752 in socket.py.
2753
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002754- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2755
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002756- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2757 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2758 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2759 opener with proxy support.
2760
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002761- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2762
2763- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2764
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002765Tools/Demos
2766-----------
2767
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002768- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2769
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002770- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2771
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002772- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2773 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002774
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002775- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2776 files.
2777
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002778Build
2779-----
2780
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002781- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002782 different root directory.
2783
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002784C API
2785-----
2786
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002787- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2788 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2789 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2790 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2791 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2792 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2793 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2794 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2795 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2796 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2797
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002798- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2799 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2800 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2801 from Python.
2802
2803
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002804New platforms
2805-------------
2806
2807None this time.
2808
2809Tests
2810-----
2811
2812- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2813 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2814
2815Windows
2816-------
2817
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002818- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2819
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002820- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2821 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2822 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2823 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2824 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2825 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2826 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2827 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2828 that's what it's for.
2829
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002830Mac
2831---
2832
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002833- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2834 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2835 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2836 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002837- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2838 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2839- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002840
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002841SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2842------------------------------------
2843
2844430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2845598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2846622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2847661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2848683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2849697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2850713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2851724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2852727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2853729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2854730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2855731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2856732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2857733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2858735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2859740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2860744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2861745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2862747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2863749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2864751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2865753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2866755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2867757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2868760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2869
2870
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002871What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2872================================
2873
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002874*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002875
2876Core and builtins
2877-----------------
2878
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002879- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2880 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2881
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002882- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2883 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2884 and cannot be strings).
2885
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002886- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2887 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2888 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2889 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2890
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002891- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2892 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2893 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2894 Python itself.
2895
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002896- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2897 the referenced object, if it has one.
2898
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002899- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2900 the thread started at
2901 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2902
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002903- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2904 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2905 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2906 placed on a list index.
2907
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002908- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2909 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2910 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2911 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2912
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002913- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2914 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2915 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2916 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2917 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2918 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2919 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2920
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002921- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2922 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2923 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2924 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2925 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2926
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002927- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2928 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002929
2930- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2931 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2932 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2933 #693195.)
2934
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002935- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2936 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002937
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002938- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002939 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002940 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2941 interpreter executions, would fail.
2942
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002943- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002944 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002945 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002946
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002947Extension modules
2948-----------------
2949
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002950- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2951 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2952 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2953 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2954
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002955- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2956 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2957
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002958- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2959 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2960 and Greg Chapman.)
2961
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002962- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2963 recursively.
2964
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002965- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002966 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2967 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2968 leaks.
2969
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002970- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2971
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002972- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2973 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2974 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2975 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2976 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2977 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2978 #705836.
2979
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002980- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002981 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2982
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002983- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2984 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2985 See SF bug #692416.
2986
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002987- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2988 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2989
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002990- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2991 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2992 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002993
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002994- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002995 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2996 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2997
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002998- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2999 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3000 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3001 timeouts to work properly.
3002
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003003Library
3004-------
3005
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003006- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3007 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3008 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3009 future release.
3010
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003011- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3012 for querying platform dependent features.
3013
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003014- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003015
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003016- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3017 pickle protocol versions.
3018
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003019- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3020 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3021 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3022
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003023- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3024
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003025- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3026 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3027 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3028 modules.
3029
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003030- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3031 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3032 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3033
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003034- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3035 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3036
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003037- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3038 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3039 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3040
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003041- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003042 MS Office extensions.
3043
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003044- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3045 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3046
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003047- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3048 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3049
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003050- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3051 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3052 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3053 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3054 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3055 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3056
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003057- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3058 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3059 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003060
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003061- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3062 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3063 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3064
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003065- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3066
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003067- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3068 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3069 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3070
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003071Tools/Demos
3072-----------
3073
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003074- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3075 See the module docstring for details.
3076
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003077Build
3078-----
3079
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003080- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3081 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003082
3083C API
3084-----
3085
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003086- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3087
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003088- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3089 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3090 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3091
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003092- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3093 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003094
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003095 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3096 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3097 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003098
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003099- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003100 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3101
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003102- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3103 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3104 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003105
3106New platforms
3107-------------
3108
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003109None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003110
3111Tests
3112-----
3113
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003114- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3115 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003116
3117Windows
3118-------
3119
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003120- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3121 function.
3122
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003123- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3124 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003125
3126Mac
3127---
3128
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003129- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3130 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003131
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003132- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3133 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003134
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003135- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3136 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3137 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003138
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003139- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003140 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3141 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003142
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003143- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3144 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003145
3146
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003147What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3148=================================
3149
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003150*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003151
3152Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003153-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003154
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003155- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3156 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3157 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3158
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003159- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3160 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3161 (SF patch #664376.)
3162
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003163- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3164 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3165 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3166 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3167 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3168 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003169 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003170
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003171- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3172 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3173 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3174 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003175 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003176
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003177- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3178 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3179 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3180 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3181 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3182 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3183 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3184 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3185 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3186 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3187 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3188
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003189- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3190 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3191 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3192 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3193 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3194 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3195
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003196- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3197 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3198
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003199- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3200 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3201 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3202 case.)
3203
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003204- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3205 passed as unicode strings.
3206
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003207- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3208 See SF bug #683467.
3209
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003210- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3211 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3212
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003213- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3214
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003215- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3216
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003217- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3218 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3219 arguments.
3220
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003221- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3222 See SF bug #667147.
3223
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003224- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003225 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003226 See SF bug #676155.
3227
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003228- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003229 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003230 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3231 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3232 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3233 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3234 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3235 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003236
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003237Extension modules
3238-----------------
3239
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003240- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3241 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3242 tp_as_number pointer.
3243
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003244- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3245 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3246 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3247 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3248 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3249
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003250- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3251
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003252- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3253
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003254- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003255 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003256 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3257 patch #678531.)
3258
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003259- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3260 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3261
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003262- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3263 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3264
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003265- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3266
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003267- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3268 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3269 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3270
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003271- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3272
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003273- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3274 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3275
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003276- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003277
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003278- datetime changes:
3279
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003280 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3281
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003282 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3283 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3284 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3285 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3286 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3287 now.
3288
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003289 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003290 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3291 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003292
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003293 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003294 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003295 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3296 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3297 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3298 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003299
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003300 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3301 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3302 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003303 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3304
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003305 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3306 by a later example coded by Guido.
3307
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003308 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003309 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3310 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3311 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003312 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3313 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3314
3315 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3316 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3317 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3318 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3319 tzinfo subclass instance.
3320
3321 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3322 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3323 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3324 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3325 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3326 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3327 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3328 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003329
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003330 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3331 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3332 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3333 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3334 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003335 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3336
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003337 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003338
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003339 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3340 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3341 as a naive datetime object.
3342
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003343 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3344 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3345 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3346
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003347 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3348 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3349 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3350 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3351 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3352 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3353 comparison.
3354
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003355 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3356 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3357 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3358 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003359 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003360
3361 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003362
3363 and ::
3364
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003365 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3366
3367 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3368 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3369 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3370 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3371
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003372 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3373 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3374 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3375 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3376 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3377
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003378 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3379 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003380 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3381 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003382
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003383Library
3384-------
3385
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003386- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3387 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3388
3389- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3390 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3391 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3392 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3393 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3394 See PEP 307 for details.
3395
3396- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3397 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3398
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003399- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3400 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003401 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003402 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3403 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003404 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003405
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003406- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3407 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3408
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003409- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3410 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3411 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3412
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003413- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3414
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003415- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3416 exception.
3417
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003418- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3419 class.
3420
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003421- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3422 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3423 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3424
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003425- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3426 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3427
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003428- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003429 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3430 See SF bug #659228.
3431
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003432- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3433 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3434 See SF patch #651082.
3435
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003436- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003437
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003438- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3439 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3440
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003441- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003442 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003443
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003444- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3445 DOS paths from other platforms.
3446
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003447Tools/Demos
3448-----------
3449
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003450- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3451 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3452 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3453 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3454 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3455 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3456 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3457 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3458 example:
3459
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003460 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3461 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003462
3463 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3464
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003465
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003466Build
3467-----
3468
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003469- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3470 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3471 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003472 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3473
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003474 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3475
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003476- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3477 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3478 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3479 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3480 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3481 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3482 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3483 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3484 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3485
3486- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3487 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3488 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3489 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3490
3491- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3492 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3493
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003494C API
3495-----
3496
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003497- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3498 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003499
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003500- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3501 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3502 tp_as_number pointer.
3503
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003504- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3505 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3506 (SF #681367)
3507
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003508- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3509 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3510 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3511 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003512
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003513Tests
3514-----
3515
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003516- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003517 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3518 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3519 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3520 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3521 pydoc.)
3522
3523- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3524
3525- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003526
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003527Windows
3528-------
3529
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003530- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3531 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3532 time).
3533
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003534- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3535 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3536
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003537- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3538 release without strong cryptography.
3539
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003540- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003541 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003542
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003543- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3544 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3545
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003546Mac
3547---
3548
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003549- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3550 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003551
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003552- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3553 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3554 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003555
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003556- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3557 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003558
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003559- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3560 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3561 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3562 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003563
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003564- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003565 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3566 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3567 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003568
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003569
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003570What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003571=================================
3572
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003573*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003574
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003575Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003576--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003577
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003578- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3579
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003580- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3581 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003582 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003583 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003584 a different meaning than before.
3585
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003586- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003587 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003588 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003589
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003590- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003591 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003592 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003593
3594- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3595 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3596 and deallocation.
3597
3598- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3599 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3600
3601- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3602 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3603 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3604 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3605 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3606
3607- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3608 now detected by the garbage collector.
3609
3610- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3611 [SF bug 519621]
3612
3613- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3614 identifier.
3615
3616- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3617 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3618 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3619 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3620 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3621 [SF bug 563060]
3622
3623- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3624 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3625 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3626 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3627 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3628
3629- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3630 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3631 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3632
3633- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3634
3635- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3636 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3637 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3638 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3639 state of the slots would be lost.)
3640
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003641Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003642-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003643
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003644- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003645 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3646 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3647 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3648 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003649 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3650 Jython 2.1.
3651
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003652- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003653 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003654 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3655 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3656 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3657 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3658 these, see PEP 302.
3659
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003660- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3661 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3662 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3663
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003664- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3665 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3666 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3667
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003668- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3669 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3670 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3671
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003672- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3673 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3674 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3675 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3676 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3677 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3678 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3679 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3680 releases or implementations.
3681
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003682- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003683 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3684 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003685
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003686- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3687 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3688
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003689- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3690 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3691 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3692
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003693- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3694 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3695
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003696- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3697 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003698 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3699 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003700
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003701- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3702 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3703 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3704 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3705 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3706
3707 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3708 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3709 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3710 pattern.
3711
3712 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3713 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3714 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3715 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3716
3717 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3718 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3719 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3720 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3721 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3722 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3723
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003724- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3725 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3726 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3727 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3728 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3729 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3730 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3731 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003732
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003733- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3734 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3735 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3736 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3737 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003738 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3739 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3740 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3741 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3742 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3743 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3744 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003745
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003746- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3747 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3748
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003749- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3750 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3751 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3752 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3753 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3754 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3755 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3756 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3757 to Zack Weinberg!
3758
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003759- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3760 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3761 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3762 type. This has been fixed now.
3763
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003764- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3765 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3766 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3767
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003768- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3769 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3770 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3771 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3772 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3773 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3774 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3775 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003776 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003777
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003778- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3779 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3780 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003781
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003782- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3783 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3784 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3785 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3786 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3787 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3788 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3789 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003790 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003791 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3792 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3793
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003794- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3795 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3796 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3797 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3798 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3799 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3800 this.)
3801
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003802- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3803 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003804 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003805 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003806 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3807 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003808 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3809 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003810
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003811- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3812 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3813 currently running.
3814
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003815- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3816 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3817 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3818 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3819
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003820- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3821 as directory names.
3822
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003823- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3824 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3825
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003826- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3827 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3828
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003829- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003830 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3831 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003832
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003833- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3834 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3835 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3836 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3837 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3838
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003839- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3840 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3841 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3842 removed.
3843
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003844- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3845 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3846 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3847
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003848- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3849 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3850 to __debug__.
3851
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003852- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3853 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3854 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3855
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003856- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3857 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3858 deprecated now.
3859
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003860- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3861 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3862 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003863
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003864- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3865 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3866 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3867 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3868 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003869
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003870- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3871 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3872
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003873- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3874 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3875 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003876 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003877 is backward compatible.
3878
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003879- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3880 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3881 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3882 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3883 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3884
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003885- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3886 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3887 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3888 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3889 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3890 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003891
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003892- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3893 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3894
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003895- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3896 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3897
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003898- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3899 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3900 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3901 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3902 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3903
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003904- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3905 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3906 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3907
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003908- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003909 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3910
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003911- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3912 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3913 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003914
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003915- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3916 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3917
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003918- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3919 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3920 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3921
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003922- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3923
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003924Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003925-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003926
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003927- Added three operators to the operator module:
3928 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3929 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3930 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3931
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003932- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3933
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003934- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3935 archives.
3936
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003937- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3938 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3939 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3940
3941 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3942
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003943- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3944 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3945 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003946 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003947
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003948- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3949 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3950 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3951 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003952 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3953 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3954 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3955 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003956
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003957- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3958 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003959
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003960- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3961
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003962- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3963 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3964
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003965- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3966 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3967 supported.
3968
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003969- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3970
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003971- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3972 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003973
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003974- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3975 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3976
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003977- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3978
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003979- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3980 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3981
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003982- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3983 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3984 functions but callable type objects.
3985
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003986- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003987 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003988 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003989
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003990- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3991 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003992
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003993- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3994 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003995
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003996- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3997 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3998 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3999 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4000
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004001- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4002 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004003
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004004- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4005 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4006 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4007 and __imul__.
4008
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004009- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004010 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4011 is called.
4012
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004013- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4014 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4015 interpreter was compiled.
4016
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004017- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4018 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4019 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004020 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004021 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4022 1, not 2.
4023
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004024- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4025 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4026 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4027 limit.
4028
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004029- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4030 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4031 bug #623464.
4032
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004033- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4034 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4035 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4036 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4037
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004038Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004039-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004040
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004041- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4042
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004043- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4044 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4045 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4046 with Python 2.3a2.
4047
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004048- os.path exposes getctime.
4049
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004050- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004051 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004052 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004053 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004054 unit tests of floating point results.
4055
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004056- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4057 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4058 has been increased.
4059
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004060- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4061 executed.
4062
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004063- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4064 postinstallation script.
4065
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004066- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4067 test the current module.
4068
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004069- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004070 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4071 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4072 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4073 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4074
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004075- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004076 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004077 Ward's Optik package.
4078
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004079- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4080 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4081 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4082 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4083
4084- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4085 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004086 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004087
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004088- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4089 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4090 shelf are binary pickles.
4091
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004092- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4093 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4094
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004095- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4096 modules are iterators now.
4097
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004098- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4099 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4100 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4101 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4102 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4103 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004104
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004105- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4106 with their entity value.
4107
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004108- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4109
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004110- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4111 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004112
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004113- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4114 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004115 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004116
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004117- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4118 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4119 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4120 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4121 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4122 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4123 main():
4124
4125 import locale
4126 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4127
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004128- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4129 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4130
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004131- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4132 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4133 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4134 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4135 to the new standard.
4136
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004137- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4138 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4139 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4140 an extension to the database.
4141
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004142- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4143 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4144 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4145 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004146 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004147
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004148- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004149 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004150
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004151- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4152 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4153 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4154 bounded integers.
4155
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004156- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4157 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4158 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4159 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4160 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4161 in existence.
4162
4163 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4164 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4165 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4166 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4167 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4168 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4169
4170 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4171 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4172 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4173 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4174
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004175- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4176 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4177 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4178
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004179- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4180
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004181- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4182 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4183 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4184 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4185
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004186- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4187 argument.
4188
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004189- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4190 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4191 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4192 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4193 [SF patch 560794].
4194
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004195- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4196 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4197 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004198 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4199 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4200 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004201
4202- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4203 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004204
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004205- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4206 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4207 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4208 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004209
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004210- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4211 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4212 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4213 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4214 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4215
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004216- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004217
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004218- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4219
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004220- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4221 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4222 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4223 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4224 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4225 identical to None.
4226
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004227- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4228 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4229 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4230 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4231 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4232 results now.
4233
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004234- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4235 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4236
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004237- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4238 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4239 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4240 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4241 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4242 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4243 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4244 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4245
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004246- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4247
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004248- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4249 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4250
4251- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4252 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4253 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4254 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4255 and other systems.
4256
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004257- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4258 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4259 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4260 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 +00004261 work well with these.
4262
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004263- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4264
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004265- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004266 connections.
4267
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004268- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4269 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4270 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4271
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004272- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4273 sets
4274
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004275- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4276 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4277 name.
4278
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004279- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4280 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4281 passed in.
4282
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004283- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004284 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004285 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4286 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004287
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004288- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4289
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004290- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4291
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004292- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4293 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4294 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4295
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004296- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4297 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4298 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4299 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004300 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004301
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004302- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004303 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004304 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004305
4306- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4307 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4308 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4309
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004310- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004311 the value of its expression argument.
4312
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004313- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4314 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4315 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4316
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004317- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4318 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4319 skipstone browser was included.
4320
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004321- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4322 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4323
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004324Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004325-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004326
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004327- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4328 names in addition to accepting file names.
4329
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004330- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4331 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4332 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4333 still used and useful.)
4334
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004335- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4336 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4337 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4338 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004339
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004340- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4341 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4342 the generated binary.
4343
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004344Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004345-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004346
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004347- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4348
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004349- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4350 except in the hands of experts.
4351
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004352- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004353 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4354 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4355 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004356
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004357- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4358 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4359 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4360 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4361 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4362 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4363 builds.
4364
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004365- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4366 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4367 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4368 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4369 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4370 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4371 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4372 new type.
4373
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004374- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004375
4376 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4377 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4378 positive infinities.
4379
4380 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4381 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4382 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4383 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4384 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4385 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4386 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4387
4388 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4389
4390 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4391
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004392- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4393 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4394 size of the executable.
4395
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004396- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4397 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4398 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4399 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004400
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004401- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4402
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004403- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4404 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4405 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004406
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004407- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4408 well as Unix.
4409
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004410- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4411 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4412 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4413 modules in the README file for details.
4414
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004415C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004416-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004417
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004418- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4419 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004420 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004421 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004422 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004423
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004424- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4425 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4426 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4427 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4428 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4429 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004430 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004431 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4432 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4433 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4434 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4435 aligned.)
4436
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004437- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4438 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4439 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4440
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004441- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4442 level.
4443
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004444- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4445 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4446 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4447 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4448 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4449
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004450- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4451 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4452 code.
4453
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004454- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4455 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4456 adjusting for negative indices.
4457
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004458- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4459 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4460 object.
4461
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004462- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4463 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4464 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4465
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004466- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4467 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004468
4469- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4470
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004471- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4472 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4473 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4474 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4475
4476- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4477
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004478- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004479
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004480- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004481 without going through the buffer API.
4482
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004483- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004484
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004485- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4486 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4487 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4488 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4489
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004490- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4491 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4492
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004493- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004494 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4495
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004496New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004497-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004498
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004499- OpenVMS is now supported.
4500
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004501- AtheOS is now supported.
4502
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004503- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4504
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004505- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4506
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004507Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004508-----
4509
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004510- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4511 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4512 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004513
4514Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004515-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004516
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004517- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4518 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4519 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4520 bugs.
4521 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004522 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004523 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4524 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004525 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004526
4527- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004528 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004529
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004530- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4531 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4532
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004533- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4534 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004535 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004536 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4537
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004538- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4539 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4540 use files" uninstall option).
4541
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004542- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4543
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004544- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4545 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4546
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004547- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4548 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4549 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4550
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004551- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4552 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4553 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4554 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4555 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004556 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4557 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4558 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004559
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004560- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004561 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004562 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4563 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4564 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4565 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4566 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4567 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4568 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4569 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4570 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4571 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4572 work around.
4573
4574- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4575 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4576 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4577 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4578 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4579 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4580 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4581 specified with O_CREAT too).
4582
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004583Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004584----
4585
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004586- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004587
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004588- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4589 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4590 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4591
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004592- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4593 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4594 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4595
4596- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4597 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4598 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4599 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4600 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4601 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4602 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4603 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004604
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004605- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4606 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4607 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004608
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004609- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4610 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4611 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4612 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4613 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004614
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004615- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4616 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4617 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004618
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004619- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4620 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004621
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004622- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4623 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4624 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4625 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4626 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004627
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004628- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4629 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4630 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4631
4632- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4633 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4634 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004635
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004636- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4637 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4638 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4639 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004640 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004641
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004642- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4643 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004644
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004645- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4646 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004647
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004648- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004649 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004650 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4651 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004652
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004653
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004654What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004655===============================
4656
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004657*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4658
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004659Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004660--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004661
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004662- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4663 with a custom metaclass.
4664
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004665Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004666-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004667
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004668- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4669 are proxies.
4670
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004671Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004672-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004673
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004674- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4675 very short strings.
4676
4677- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4678 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4679 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4680 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4681 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4682
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004683Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004684-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004685
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004686- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4687 close or delete time).
4688
4689- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4690 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4691
4692- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4693
4694- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004695 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004696
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004697Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004698-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004699
4700Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004701-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004702
4703C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004704-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004705
4706New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004707-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004708
4709Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004710-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004711
4712Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004713-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004714
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004715- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4716
4717- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4718 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4719
4720- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4721 deleted at process exit time.
4722
4723- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4724 in backslash.
4725
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004726Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004727----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004728
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004729- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4730 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4731 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4732
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004733
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004734What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004735===========================
4736
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004737*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4738
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004739Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004740--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004741
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004742- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4743 been extensively updated. See
4744
4745 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4746
4747 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4748
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004749- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4750 deleted!
4751
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004752- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4753 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4754 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4755 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4756 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4757
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004758- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4759
4760 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4761 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4762
4763 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4764 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4765 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4766 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4767 supported anyway.
4768
4769 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4770 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4771
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004772- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4773 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4774 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4775 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4776 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004777
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004778- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4779 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4780 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4781
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004782Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004783-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004784
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004785- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4786 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4787 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4788 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4789 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4790 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004791 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4792 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4793 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4794 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004795
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004796- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4797 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4798 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4799
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004800Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004801-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004802
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004803- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4804
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004805Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004806-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004807
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004808- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4809 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4810 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4811 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4812 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4813 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4814
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004815- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4816
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004817- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4818
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004819- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4820
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004821- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4822 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4823 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4824
4825- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4826
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004827Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004828-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004829
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004830- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4831 off a search on Google.
4832
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004833Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004834-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004835
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004836- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4837 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4838 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4839 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4840 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4841 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4842 other platforms should do likewise.
4843
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004844- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4845 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4846 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4847
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004848C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004849-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004850
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004851- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4852 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4853 producing key-value pairs.
4854
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004855- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004856 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004857 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4858 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4859 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4860 previously went unchallenged.
4861
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004862New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004863-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004864
4865Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004866-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004867
4868Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004869-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004870
4871Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004872----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004873
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004874- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4875 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004876
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004877- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4878 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4879 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4880 home.
4881
4882
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004883What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004884===========================
4885
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004886*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4887
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004888Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004889--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004890
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004891- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4892 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004893
4894 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004895 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004896
4897 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4898 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004899 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004900 This needs to be documented.
4901
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004902- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4903 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4904
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004905- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4906 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4907 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4908
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004909- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4910 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4911
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004912- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4913 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4914 class forbids it).
4915
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004916- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4917 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4918 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4919
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004920- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4921
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004922Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004923-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004924
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004925- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4926 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004927 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004928
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004929- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4930 (like 1 + '').
4931
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004932Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004933-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004934
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004935- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4936 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4937 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4938 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004939 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004940 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4941
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004942- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4943 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4944 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4945 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4946
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004947- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4948 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004949 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4950 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4951 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004952
4953- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4954 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004955
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004956- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4957 bytes on its input.
4958
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004959Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004960-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004961
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004962- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004963 convenience function.
4964
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004965- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4966 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4967 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004968 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4969 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4970 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4971 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4972 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4973 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004974
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004975- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4976 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4977 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4978 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4979
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004980- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4981 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4982 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4983
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004984- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4985 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4986 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4987 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4988
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004989- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4990 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004991 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004992 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4993 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4994 new -l and -e options.
4995
4996- statcache is now deprecated.
4997
4998- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4999 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005000 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005001 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5002 time properly taken into account.
5003
5004- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5005 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5006 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5007 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5008
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005009Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005010-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005011
5012Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005013-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005014
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005015- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5016 is built with libdb3 if available.
5017
5018- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5019
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005020C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005021-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005022
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005023- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5024 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5025 PySequence_Size().
5026
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005027- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5028
5029- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5030 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5031 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5032
5033- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5034 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5035
5036- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5037 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5038
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005039New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005040-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005041
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005042- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5043 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5044
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005045- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5046 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5047
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005048- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5049
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005050Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005051-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005052
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005053- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5054 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5055
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005056Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005057-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005058
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005059Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005060----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005061
5062- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5063 removed completely in the next release.
5064
5065- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5066 OSX.
5067
5068- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5069 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5070
5071- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5072
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005073
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005074What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005075===========================
5076
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005077*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5078
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005079Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005080--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005081
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005082- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005083 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005084 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005085 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5086 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005087 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5088 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005089 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5090 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005091
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005092- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5093 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5094
5095- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5096 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5097
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005098Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005099-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005100
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005101- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5102 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5103 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5104 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5105 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5106 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5107 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5108 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5109
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005110- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5111 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5112 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5113 example).
5114
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005115- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005116 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005117 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005118 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005119
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005120- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5121 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5122 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005123 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005124
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005125- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5126 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5127 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5128 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5129 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5130 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5131
5132 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5133
5134 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5135
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005136Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005137-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005138
5139- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5140
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005141- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5142
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005143- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5144 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005145
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005146- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5147 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5148 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5149 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5150 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5151 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005152 attributes.
5153
5154- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5155 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5156 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005157
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005158- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5159 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5160 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005161
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005162- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5163 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5164 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005165 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5166 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5167
5168- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5169 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005170
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005171Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005172-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005173
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005174- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5175 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5176
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005177- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5178 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5179 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5180 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5181
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005182- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5183 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5184 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5185 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5186
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005187 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5188 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5189 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5190 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5191 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5192 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5193 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5194 without losing information).
5195
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005196- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005197 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5198 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5199 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5200 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5201 module).
5202
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005203 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005204 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5205 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5206 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5207 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005208
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005209- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005210 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5211 encoding.
5212
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005213- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5214 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5215
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005216- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005217 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5218
5219- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5220 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5221 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5222 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5223
5224- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5225
5226- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5227 ON, and OFF.
5228
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005229- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5230 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5231
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005232Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005233-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005234
5235- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5236 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5237 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005238
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005239- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5240 been added: -X and -E.
5241
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005242Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005243-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005244
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005245- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5246 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5247
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005248C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005249-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005250
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005251- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5252 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5253 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5254 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5255 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5256
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005257- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5258 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5259 as long) arguments.
5260
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005261- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5262 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5263 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5264 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5265 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5266 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5267
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005268- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5269 input.
5270
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005271New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005272-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005273
5274Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005275-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005276
5277Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005278-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005279
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005280- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5281 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5282 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5283
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005284- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5285 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5286 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005287 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005288
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005289 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5290 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5291 import signal
5292 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005293
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005294 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005295 while 1:
5296 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005297 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005298 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5299 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5300 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5301 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005302
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005303
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005304What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5305===========================
5306
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005307*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5308
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005309Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005310--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005311
5312- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5313 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5314 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5315
5316- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5317 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5318 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5319 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5320 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5321 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5322 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005323
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005324- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005325 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005326 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5327 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5328 associate a docstring with a property.
5329
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005330- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5331 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5332 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5333 other built-in object types.
5334
5335- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5336 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5337 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5338 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5339 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5340
5341- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5342 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5343
5344- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5345 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005346 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005347 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5348 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5349 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5350 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5351 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5352
5353- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5354 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5355 class.
5356
5357- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5358 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5359 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5360 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5361
5362- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5363 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5364 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5365 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5366
5367- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5368 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5369
5370- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5371 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5372 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5373 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5374 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005375 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005376 with the same value as s.
5377
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005378- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5379
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005380Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005381----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005382
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005383- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5384
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005385- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5386 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5387 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5388 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5389 objects.
5390
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005391- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5392 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005393 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5394 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5395
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005396- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5397 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5398 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5399
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005400Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005401-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005402
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005403- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5404 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5405 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5406 by the instances.
5407
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005408- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5409 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5410 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5411
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005412- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5413 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5414 before the entire comparison is complete.
5415
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005416- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5417 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5418 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5419
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005420- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5421 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5422 getwriter().
5423
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005424- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5425 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5426
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005427- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005428 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5429 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5430
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005431- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5432 iterable object.
5433
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005434- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5435 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005436
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005437- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5438 authentication.
5439
5440- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5441 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005442
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005443- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005444 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5445 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5446 a sample driver.)
5447
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005448Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005449-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005450
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005451- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5452 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5453 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5454 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5455 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5456 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5457 kernel has large file support.
5458
5459- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5460 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5461 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5462 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5463 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5464
5465- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5466 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5467 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5468
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005469C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005470-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005471
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005472- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5473 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5474
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005475New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005476-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005477
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005478- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5479 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5480
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005481Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005482-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005483
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005484- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5485 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5486 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5487 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5488 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5489
5490- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5491 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5492 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5493 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5494
5495- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5496 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5497
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005498Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005499-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005500
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005501- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005502 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5503 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005504
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005505
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005506What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5507===========================
5508
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005509*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5510
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005511Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005512----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005513
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005514- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5515 big to represent as a C double.
5516
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005517- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5518 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5519 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5520 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5521 restriction).
5522
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005523- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5524 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5525 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5526 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5527 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5528
5529 >>> dir([])
5530 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5531 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5532 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5533 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5534 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5535 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5536 'reverse', 'sort']
5537
5538 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5539
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005540- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005541 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5542 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5543 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5544 OverflowError exception.
5545
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005546- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005547 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005548 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5549 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5550 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5551 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5552 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005553 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005554 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5555 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5556
5557 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5558 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5559 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5560 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005561
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005562- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005563 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5564 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5565 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5566 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5567 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5568 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5569 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5570 once it is created.
5571
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005572- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5573 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5574 (key, value) pairs.
5575
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005576- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005577 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5578 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5579
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005580- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5581 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5582 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5583 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5584 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005585
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005586- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005587 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5588 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5589
5590 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5591
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005592- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005593 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5594
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005595Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005596-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005597
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005598- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005599 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5600 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005601
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005602- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5603 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5604 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5605 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5606 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5607 in this area anymore).
5608
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005609- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5610 threading.Timer.
5611
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005612- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5613 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5614
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005615- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005616 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5617
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005618- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005619 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5620 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5621 converted to Python longs.
5622
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005623- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005624 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5625
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005626- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5627 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5628 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5629
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005630Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005631-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005632
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005633- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5634 division operators as per PEP 238.
5635
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005636Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005637-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005638
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005639- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5640 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5641 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5642 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5643
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005644C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005645-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005646
5647- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005648
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005649- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5650 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005651 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005652
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005653 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5654 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005655 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005656 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005657
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005658- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005659 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5660 module:
5661
5662 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005663
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005664 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5665 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005666
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005667 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5668 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005669
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005670 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5671
5672 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5673
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005674- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005675 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5676 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5677 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005678
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005679New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005680-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005681
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005682- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5683 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5684 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5685 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5686 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005687
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005688Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005689-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005690
5691Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005692-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005693
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005694- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5695 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5696 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5697 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005698 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5699 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5700 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5701 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5702 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005703
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005704- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005705 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5706
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005707
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005708What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5709===========================
5710
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005711*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5712
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005713Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005714-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005715
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005716- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5717 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5718
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005719- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5720 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5721 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005722
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005723- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5724 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5725 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5726 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005727
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005728- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5729
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005730- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005731
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005732Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005733-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005734
5735- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005736 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005737 the module docstring for details.
5738
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005739Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005740-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005741
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005742- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005743 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5744 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5745 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005746
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005747- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5748 Nick Mathewson.
5749
5750Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005751----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005752
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005753- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5754 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5755 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5756 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5757 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5758 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5759 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5760 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5761
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005762- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5763 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5764 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5765 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5766
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005767- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5768 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5769 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5770 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5771 come a long way).
5772
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005773- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5774 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5775 write filters for these warnings).
5776
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005777- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5778 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5779 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5780 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5781 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5782
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005783- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5784 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5785 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5786 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5787 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5788 older distribution.
5789
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005790Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005791-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005792
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005793- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5794 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005795 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005796
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005797- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5798 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5799 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5800
5801- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5802
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005803- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5804
5805- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5806
5807- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5808
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005809- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005810
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005811- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5812
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005813New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005814-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005815
5816C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005817-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005818
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005819- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5820 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5821 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5822 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5823 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5824 against buffer overruns.
5825
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005826- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005827 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5828 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005829 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5830 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5831 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5832
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005833- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5834 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5835 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5836 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5837 deprecated.
5838
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005839Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005840-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005841
5842- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5843 relevant is found.
5844
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005845
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005846What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005847===========================
5848
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005849*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5850
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005851Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005852----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005853
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005854- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5855 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5856 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5857 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5858 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5859 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5860 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5861 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005862 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005863 repaired.
5864
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005865- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005866 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005867 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5868 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5869 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5870 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5871 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5872 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5873 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5874 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5875
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005876- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5877 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5878 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5879 leading BMO character).
5880
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005881- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5882 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5883 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5884
5885 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5886 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5887 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005888
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005889 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5890 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5891 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5892 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5893 for various simple to use conversions.
5894
5895 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5896 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5897
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005898 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5899 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5900 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5901 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5902 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5903 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5904 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5905 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5906 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5907 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5908 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5909 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5910 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5911 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5912 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005913
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005914- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5915 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5916 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005917 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005918 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005919
5920 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005921 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5922 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5923 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5924 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5925 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005926 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5927 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005928
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005929 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5930 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5931 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005932 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005933
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005934- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5935 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5936 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5937 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5938 floating arithmetic,
5939
5940 x = 9007199254740992.0
5941 print long(x)
5942
5943 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5944 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5945 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5946 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5947 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5948 functions are of good quality).
5949
5950 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5951 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5952 algorithms to break.
5953
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005954- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5955 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5956 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5957 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5958 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5959 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5960 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5961 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5962 order.
5963
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005964- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5965 operation along the most common code paths.
5966
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005967- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5968 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5969
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005970- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5971 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5972 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5973 {}.update(UserDict())
5974
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005975- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5976 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5977 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5978 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5979 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5980 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5981 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5982 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5983
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005984- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005985 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005986
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005987 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005988 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5989 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005990 join() method of strings
5991 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005992 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5993 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005994 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005995 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005996
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005997- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5998 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5999
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006000- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6001 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6002
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006003- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6004 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6005 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6006 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6007
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006008- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6009 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006010 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006011 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6012 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006013
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006014- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6015
6016
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006017Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006018-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006019
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006020- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006021 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006022 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6023 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6024
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006025- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6026 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6027
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006028- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6029 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6030 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6031 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6032
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006033- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6034 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6035 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6036
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006037- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6038
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006039- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6040
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006041- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6042 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6043 that are still imported into string.py).
6044
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006045- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6046
6047- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6048 Now it does.
6049
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006050- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6051
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006052- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6053 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6054 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6055 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6056 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006057 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6058 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006059
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006060- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6061 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6062 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6063 'help(object)'.
6064
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006065Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006066-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006067
6068- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006069 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006070 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6071 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6072
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006073- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006074 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6075 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006076
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006077C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006078-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006079
6080- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6081 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006082
6083----
6084
6085**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**