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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
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
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000015- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000016 (fixes bug #1119418).
17
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000018- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
19
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000020- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
21 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
22
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000023- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
24 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
25 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
26
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000027- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
28
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000029- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
30 reference counts in some error exit cases.
31
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000032- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
33 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
34 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
35 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
36 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
37 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
38 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
39 realloc.
40
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000041- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
42 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
43
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000044- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
45 like their int counterparts.
46
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000047- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
48 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
49 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
50 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
51 for a longer write-up of the problem).
52
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000053- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
54 serializing floats.
55
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000056- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
57 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
58 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
59
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000060- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
61 278.
62
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000063- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
64 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
65 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
66 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +000067 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000068 PyNumber_*().
69 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
70
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000071- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
72 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
73 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
74 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
75
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000076- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
77 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
78 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
79 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
80 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
81
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000082- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
83 disabled caused a crash.
84
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000085- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
86 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
87
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000088- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000089 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
90
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000091- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
92
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000093- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000094 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
95 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
96 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000097
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000098- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
99
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000100- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
101 returning None.
102
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000103- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000104 ('\') with a specific error message.
105
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000106- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
107
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000108- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
109 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
110
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000111- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000112 an ferror() call.
113
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000114- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
115 list.sort().
116
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000117- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
118 (2+3) --> (5).
119
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000120- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
121
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000122- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
123 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000124
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000125- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
126 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
127 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
128
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000129- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
130 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
131 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
132
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000133Extension Modules
134-----------------
135
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000136- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
137 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000138
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000139- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
140
141- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000142 line without newlines.
143
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000144- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
145 on Windows.
146
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000147- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
148 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
149
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000150- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
151 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
152 for large or negative values.
153
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000154- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000155 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000156
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000157- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
158
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000159- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
160 if available on the platform.
161
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000162- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
163 available on the platform.
164
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000165- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
166 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
167
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000168- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
169
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000170- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
171 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
172 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
173
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000174- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
175
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000176- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
177 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
178
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000179- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000180 file size.
181
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000182- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
183
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000184- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
185 {remove_history,replace_history}
186
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000187- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
188 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000189
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000190- stat_float_times is now True.
191
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000192- array.array objects are now picklable.
193
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000194- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
195 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
196
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000197- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
198 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
199 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
200
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000201- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
202 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000203
204Library
205-------
206
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000207- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
208
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000209- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
210 functionality.
211
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000212- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
213
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000214- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
215 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
216
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000217- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
218 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
219 match the Content-Length header.
220
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000221- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
222
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000223- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
224 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
225 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
226
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000227- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
228
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000229- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
230
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000231- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
232 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
233
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000234- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
235 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
236 Tkdnd.
237
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000238- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
239 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
240
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000241- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
242 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
243
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000244- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000245 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
246
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000247- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
248 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
249
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000250- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
251 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
252
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000253- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000254 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000255
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000256- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
257
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000258- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
259 error messages.
260
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000261- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
262
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000263- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
264 Bug #1224621.
265
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000266- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
267 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
268 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
269 terminates by raising StopIteration.
270
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000271- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
272
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000273- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
274 component of the path.
275
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000276- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
277 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
278 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
279 class at all.
280
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000281- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
282 files to PyPI.
283
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000284- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
285 them to PyPI.
286
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000287- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
288 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
289 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
290 work as expected.
291
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000292- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
293 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
294
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000295- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000296 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
297
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000298- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
299
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000300- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
301 to build.
302
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000303- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
304 symbolic links on Windows.
305
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000306- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000307 profile.py if available.
308
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000309- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
310
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000311- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
312 in LWPCookieJar.
313
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000314- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
315
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000316- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
317
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000318- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
319
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000320- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
321
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000322- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
323
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000324- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
325
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000326- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
327
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000328- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
329
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000330- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
331 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
332 be exploited in various ways.
333
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000334- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
335
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000336- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
337
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000338- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
339
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000340- Enhancements to the csv module:
341
342 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000343 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000344 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000345 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
346 reporting.
347 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
348 dictates.
349 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000350 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000351 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000352 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
353 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000354 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
355 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000356 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000357 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
358 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
359 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
360 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
361 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
362 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
363 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
364 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
365 without first creating a dialect class.
366 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
367 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
368 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000369 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000370 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
371 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000372 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
373 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
374 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
375 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000376 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
377 This has been fixed.
378
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000379- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
380 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
381 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
382 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
383
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000384- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
385
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000386- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
387 (Bug #951915).
388
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000389- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
390 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
391 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000392 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000393
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000394- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
395
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000396- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
397 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
398
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000399- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
400
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000401- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
402
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000403- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
404
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000405- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
406
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000407- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
408
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000409- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
410 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
411 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
412
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000413- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000414 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000415
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000416- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
417 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
418 tokenizer with very long source lines.
419
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000420- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
421 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
422
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000423- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
424 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000425
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000426- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
427 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
428
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000429- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
430 correctly.
431
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000432- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
433 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
434 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
435 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
436 between two lines.
437
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000438- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
439 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
440 handlers.
441
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000442- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000443 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
444 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000445
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000446- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
447 considering it exactly like a '*'.
448
449
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000450Build
451-----
452
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000453- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
454 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
455
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000456- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
457 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
458
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000459- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
460 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
461 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000462 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000463
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000464- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
465 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
466 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
467
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000468- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
469
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000470- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
471 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
472
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000473- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
474 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
475 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
476 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
477 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
478 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
479 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
480 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
481
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000482- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
483 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
484 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
485 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
486
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000487
488C API
489-----
490
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000491- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
492
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000493- Removed PyRange_New().
494
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000495
496Tests
497-----
498
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000499- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000500
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000501
502Documentation
503-------------
504
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000505- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
506
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000507- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
508
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000509- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
510
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000511- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
512
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000513- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
514
515- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
516
517- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
518
519- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
520
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000521- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
522 Closes bug #1166582.
523
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000524- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
525 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
526 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
527
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000528Mac
529---
530
531
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000532New platforms
533-------------
534
535- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
536
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000537
538Tools/Demos
539-----------
540
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000541- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
542 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
543 source files that need an encoding declaration.
544 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
545
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000546- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
547
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000548- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000549
550
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000551What's New in Python 2.4 final?
552===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000553
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000554*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000555
556Core and builtins
557-----------------
558
559- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
560 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
561 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
562
563
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000564What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
565==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000566
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000567*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000568
569Core and builtins
570-----------------
571
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000572- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
573 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
574 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
575
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000576
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000577Library
578-------
579
580- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
581 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
582 raised is re-raised.
583
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000584- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
585 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
586
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000587- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
588 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
589 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
590 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
591 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
592 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
593 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
594 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
595 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
596 by the slice are recomputed now.
597
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000598- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000599
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000600Build
601-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000602
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000603- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
604 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
605 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000606
607C API
608-----
609
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000610- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
611
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000612
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000613What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
614================================
615
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000616*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000617
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000618License
619-------
620
621The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
622is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
623changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
624Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
625intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
626durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
627the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
628License::
629
630 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
631
632says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
633to Python 2.1.1.
634
635The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
636License Version 2.
637
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000638Core and builtins
639-----------------
640
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000641- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
642 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
643 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
644 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
645 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
646 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
647 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
648 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
649 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
650 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
651
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000652- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000653
654Extension Modules
655-----------------
656
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000657- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
658 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
659 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
660 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000661
662Library
663-------
664
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000665- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
666 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
667 returned.
668
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000669- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
670
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000671- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
672 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
673
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000674- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
675
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000676- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
677 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000678
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000679- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
680
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000681- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
682
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000683- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000684 the source code is updated and reloaded.
685
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000686Build
687-----
688
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000689- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000690
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000691What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
692================================
693
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000694*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000695
696Core and builtins
697-----------------
698
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000699- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000700 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
701
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000702- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
703 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
704 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
705 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
706
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000707- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
708 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
709
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000710- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
711 constant.
712
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000713- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
714 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
715 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
716 large), and to anomalies such as
717 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
718 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
719 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
720 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000721
722Extension modules
723-----------------
724
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000725- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
726 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000727 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
728 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
729 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000730
731Library
732-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000733
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000734- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000735 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000736 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
737 --swig-cpp.
738
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000739- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
740 it is set.
741
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000742- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000743
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000744- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
745 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
746 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
747 Closes bug #1039270.
748
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000749- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000750
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000751 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000752 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
753 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
754 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
755 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
756 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
757 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
758 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
759 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
760 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
761 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
762 + Updates to documentation.
763
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000764- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
765 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
766 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
767 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
768
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000769- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000770
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000771- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
772 applications should use the getmember function.
773
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000774- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
775
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000776- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
777 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
778 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
779 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
780 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
781 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
782 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
783 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
784 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
785
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000786- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
787 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000788 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000789
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000790- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
791 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
792 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
793 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
794 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
795 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
796 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
797 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000798
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000799- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
800 the new public features (of which there are many).
801
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000802- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000803 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
804 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
805 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
806 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000807 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000808
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000809- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
810
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000811- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
812 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
813 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
814 options.
815
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000816- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
817 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
818 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
819 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
820 conditions under which non-string values work.
821
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000822Build
823-----
824
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000825- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
826 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
827 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
828
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000829- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
830 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
831 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
832 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
833 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000834
835C API
836-----
837
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000838- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
839 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
840
841- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
842
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000843- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
844 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
845 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
846 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
847 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
848 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
849 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
850 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
851 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
852
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000853- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
854
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000855- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
856 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
857 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000858
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000859Tests
860-----
861
862- test__locale ported to unittest
863
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000864Mac
865---
866
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000867- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
868 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
869 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000870
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000871Tools/Demos
872-----------
873
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000874- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
875 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
876 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
877 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
878 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000879
880
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000881What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
882=================================
883
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000884*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000885
886Core and builtins
887-----------------
888
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000889- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000890 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
891
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000892- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
893 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
894 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
895 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
896 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
897 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
898 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
899 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000900 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
901 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
902 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
903 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
904 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000905
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000906- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
907 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
908 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
909 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
910 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
911
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000912- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
913
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000914- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
915 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
916
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000917- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
918 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
919 modified the list.
920
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000921- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
922 functions is now writable.
923
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000924- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
925 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
926 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
927 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
928
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000929- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
930 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
931 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
932 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
933 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000934
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000935- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
936 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
937
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000938Extension modules
939-----------------
940
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000941- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
942
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000943- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
944 data.
945
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000946- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
947 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
948 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
949 supposed to have been truncated away.
950
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000951- Added socket.socketpair().
952
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000953- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
954 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
955
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000956- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000957 versions of Python, have now been removed.
958
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000959Library
960-------
961
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000962- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000963 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000964
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000965- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
966 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
967
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000968- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
969 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
970
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000971- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
972
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000973- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
974 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000975
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000976- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
977 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
978
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000979- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
980
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000981- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
982
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000983- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
984
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000985- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
986 Percivall.
987
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000988- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
989 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
990
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000991- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
992 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
993 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000994 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000995
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000996- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
997 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
998 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
999 and exponent.
1000
1001- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1002
1003- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001004 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001005 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1006
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001007- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1008 to the readline module.
1009
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001010- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001011 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1012 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001013
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001014- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1015 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1016 contains symlinks.
1017
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001018- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1019 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1020
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001021- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1022 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1023 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1024
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001025- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1026 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1027 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1028 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1029 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1030 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1031 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1032 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1033 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1034 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1035 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1036 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1037 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1038
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001039- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1040
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001041Tools/Demos
1042-----------
1043
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001044- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1045 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1046
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001047- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1048
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001049Build
1050-----
1051
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001052- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1053 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1054 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1055 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1056 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1057 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1058 plans to do so.
1059
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001060- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1061 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1062
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001063- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1064 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1065
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001066- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1067 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1068
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001069- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1070 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1071
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001072- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1073 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1074
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001075C API
1076-----
1077
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001078..
1079
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001080Documentation
1081-------------
1082
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001083- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1084 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1085
1086- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1087 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1088 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001089
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001090New platforms
1091-------------
1092
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001093- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1094
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001095Tests
1096-----
1097
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001098..
1099
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001100Windows
1101-------
1102
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001103- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1104 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1105 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1106 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1107 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1108 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1109 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1110 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1111 the problem.
1112
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001113Mac
1114---
1115
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001116..
1117
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001118
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001119What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1120=================================
1121
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001122*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001123
1124Core and builtins
1125-----------------
1126
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001127- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1128 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1129 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1130 sensitive code.
1131
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001132- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001133 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001134
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001135 @staticmethod
1136 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001137
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001138 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001139
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001140- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1141 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1142 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1143 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1144 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1145 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1146 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1147 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1148 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1149 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1150 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1151
1152 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1153 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1154 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1155 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1156 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1157 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1158 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1159
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001160- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1161 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1162
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001163- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001164 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001165
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001166- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001167 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001168 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1169
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001170- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001171 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1172 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1173
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001174- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1175 types that support garbage collection.
1176
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001177- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1178
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001179- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1180 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1181 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1182 Jython.
1183
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001184- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1185
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001186- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1187 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1188
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001189- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1190 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1191 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001192
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001193- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1194 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1195 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1196
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001197Extension modules
1198-----------------
1199
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001200- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1201
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001202Library
1203-------
1204
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001205- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1206 TIS-620
1207
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001208- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1209 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1210 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1211 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1212 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1213 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1214 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1215 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1216 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1217 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1218
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001219- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1220
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001221- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1222 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1223 same as when the argument is omitted).
1224 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1225
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001226- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1227
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001228- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1229 schemes are offered.
1230
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001231- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1232
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001233- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1234 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1235 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1236
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001237- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1238
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001239- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1240 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1241
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001242- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1243 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1244 when dummy_threading is being used.
1245
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001246- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1247 from a tarfile.
1248
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001249- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001250 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001251
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001252- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1253 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1254 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1255 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1256
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001257- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1258 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1259
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001260- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1261 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1262 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1263 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1264 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1265 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1266 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1267 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1268 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1269 by some other method in progress).
1270
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001271- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1272 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1273 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001274
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001275- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1276
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001277- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1278 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1279 AM Kuchling.
1280
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001281- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1282 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1283 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1284
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001285- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1286 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1287 instead of unsigned.
1288
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001289- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001290 no longer part of the public API.
1291
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001292- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1293 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1294 string methods of the same name).
1295
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001296- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001297 SF patch 945642.
1298
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001299- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1300
1301 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1302
1303 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1304 DocTestSuites.
1305
1306- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1307 that provide thread-local data.
1308
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001309- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1310 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1311
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001312- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1313
1314- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1315 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1316 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1317
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001318- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1319
1320 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1321 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1322 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001323
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001324 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1325 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1326 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1327 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1328
1329 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1330 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1331
1332 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1333 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1334 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1335 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1336
1337 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1338 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1339 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1340 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1341 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1342
1343 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1344 wrapping help output.
1345
1346 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1347 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1348 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001349
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001350C API
1351-----
1352
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001353- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1354 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1355 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1356 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1357 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1358 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1359 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1360 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1361 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1362 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1363 its visible semantics have not changed.
1364
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001365- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1366 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1367
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001368Documentation
1369-------------
1370
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001371- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001372
1373 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001374 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001375
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001376 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001377
1378 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1379
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001380- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001381
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001382Tests
1383-----
1384
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001385- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001386 platforms that use the Makefile.
1387
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001388- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1389 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1390 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1391
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001392
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001393What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1394=================================
1395
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001396*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001397
1398Core and builtins
1399-----------------
1400
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001401- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1402 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1403 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1404 objects now (one object instead of three).
1405
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001406- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1407 Windows DLLs.
1408
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001409- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1410 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001411
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001412- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1413 a new .pyc magic.
1414
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001415- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1416 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1417 be there.
1418
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001419- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1420 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1421 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1422
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001423- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1424 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1425 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1426
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001427- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1428
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001429- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1430 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1431 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001432
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001433- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1434 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1435
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001436- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1437
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001438- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001439 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001440
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001441- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1442
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001443- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1444
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001445- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1446 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1447
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001448- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1449 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1450 Fixes bug #858016 .
1451
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001452- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1453 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1454 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1455
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001456- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1457 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1458 improves their performance (about 35%).
1459
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001460- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1461 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1462 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1463
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001464- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1465 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1466 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1467 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1468
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001469- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1470 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001471 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001472 length is not known).
1473
1474- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1475 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001476 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1477 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001478 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1479
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001480- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1481 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1482
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001483- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1484 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1485 keyword arguments.
1486
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001487- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1488 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1489 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1490
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001491- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1492 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1493 cases.
1494
1495- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1496 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1497 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1498 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1499 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1500 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1501 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1502 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1503 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1504 a release build.
1505
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001506- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1507 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1508
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001509- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001510 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001511
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001512- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1513 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1514 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1515 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1516 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1517 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1518 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1519 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1520 destroyed.
1521
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001522- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1523 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1524 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1525 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1526 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1527 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1528 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1529 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1530
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001531- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1532 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1533 character other than a space.
1534
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001535- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1536 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1537 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1538 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1539 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1540 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1541 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1542 attributes with the same name.
1543
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001544- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1545 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1546 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1547 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1548 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1549 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1550 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1551 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1552 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1553 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1554 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1555 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1556 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1557 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001558
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001559- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1560 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1561 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1562 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1563 This has been repaired.
1564
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001565- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1566
1567- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1568
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001569- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1570 over a sequence.
1571
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001572- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001573 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001574
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001575- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1576
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001577- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1578 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1579 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1580 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1581 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1582 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1583 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1584 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1585
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001586- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1587 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1588 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1589
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001590- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1591 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1592 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1593 freelist.
1594
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001595- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1596 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1597
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001598- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1599 number.
1600
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001601- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1602 a TypeError exception.
1603
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001604- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1605 820195.
1606
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001607- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1608 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1609 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1610
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001611- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001612 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1613 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001614
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001615- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1616 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1617 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1618
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001619- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1620 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001621 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001622
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001623- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001624 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1625 the first call.
1626
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001627
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001628Extension modules
1629-----------------
1630
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001631- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1632 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1633
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001634- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1635 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1636 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1637 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1638 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1639 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1640 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001641
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001642- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1643
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001644- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1645
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001646- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1647 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1648
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001649- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1650 fewer false positives.
1651
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001652- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1653 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1654
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001655- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001656 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1657
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001658- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001659 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001660 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001661 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1662 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001663
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001664- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1665 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1666 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1667 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1668
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001669- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1670 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1671 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1672 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1673 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1674 #897625.
1675
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001676- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1677 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1678
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001679- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1680 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1681 and pops on either side of the deque.
1682
1683- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1684 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1685
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001686- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1687 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1688 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1689 other functions that expect a function argument.
1690
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001691- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1692
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001693- os.getsid was added.
1694
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001695- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1696 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1697 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1698
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001699- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1700
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001701- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1702
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001703- readline.clear_history was added.
1704
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001705- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1706
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001707- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1708
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001709- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1710
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001711- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1712
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001713- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1714
1715- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1716
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001717- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1718
1719- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1720
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001721- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1722 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1723 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1724
1725- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1726 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1727 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1728 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1729 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1730 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1731 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1732
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001733- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1734 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1735 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1736 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001737
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001738- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001739 iterators from a single iterable.
1740
1741- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1742 of raising a TypeError exception.
1743
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001744- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1745 as parameter.
1746
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001747Library
1748-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001749
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001750- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1751
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001752- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1753 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1754 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001755
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001756- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1757 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1758 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001759
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001760- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001761
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001762- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1763 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001764
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001765- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1766 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1767
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001768- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1769
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001770- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001771 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001772
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001773- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001774 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001775
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001776- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1777
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001778- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1779 on cygwin and mingw32.
1780
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001781- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1782
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001783- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1784 module.
1785
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001786- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1787 installation scheme for all platforms.
1788
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001789- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001790 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001791
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001792- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1793 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1794 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1795
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001796- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1797 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1798 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1799
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001800- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1801
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001802- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1803
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001804- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1805 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1806
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001807- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1808 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1809 type pattern with the same value exists.
1810
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001811- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1812 when run from the command prompt).
1813
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001814- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1815 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1816
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001817- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1818 default sort).
1819
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001820- Added global runctx function to profile module
1821
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001822- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1823
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001824- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1825
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001826- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1827
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001828- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001829 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1830 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1831 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1832 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1833 accordingly.
1834
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001835- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1836 decoding standards.
1837
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001838- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1839 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1840 called for all requests.
1841
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001842- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1843 they are passed to the compiler.
1844
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001845- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1846 indent, width and depth.
1847
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001848- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1849 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1850
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001851- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1852 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1853
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001854- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1855
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001856- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1857
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001858- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1859
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001860- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1861 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1862
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001863- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001864 for better performance.
1865
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001866- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001867
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001868- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1869 a string).
1870
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001871- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1872
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001873- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1874
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001875- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1876
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001877- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1878
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001879- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1880 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1881 list of fieldnames.
1882
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001883- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1884 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1885
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001886- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1887
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001888- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1889 empty lists.
1890
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001891- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1892 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1893 and shelves.
1894
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001895- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1896 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1897
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001898- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001899 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1900 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001901
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001902- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1903 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001904 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001905
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001906- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001907 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1908 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1909
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001910- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1911 and removed in Py2.4.
1912
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001913- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1914
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001915- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1916
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001917Tools/Demos
1918-----------
1919
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001920- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1921 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1922
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001923- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1924
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001925- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1926 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1927 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1928 destination in situations where both files are given.
1929
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001930- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1931 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1932 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1933 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1934
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001935- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1936
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001937- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1938 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1939 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1940 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1941 now.
1942
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001943- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1944 in effect
1945
1946- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1947 C-c C-h
1948
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001949- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1950 -d option was given.
1951
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001952Build
1953-----
1954
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001955- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1956 build under OS X.
1957
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001958- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1959 --enable-profiling.
1960
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001961- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1962 is configured --with-tsc.
1963
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001964- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1965 on AMD64.
1966
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001967- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1968 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1969
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001970- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1971 removed.
1972
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001973- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1974 supported (see PEP 11).
1975
1976- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1977
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001978- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1979
1980- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1981 (see PEP 11).
1982
1983- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1984 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1985
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001986C API
1987-----
1988
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001989- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1990 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1991 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1992
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001993- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1994 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1995 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1996 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1997
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001998- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1999 generator objects.
2000
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002001- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2002 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002003 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2004 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002005
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002006- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2007 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2008
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002009- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2010 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2011 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2012 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2013 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2014
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002015- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2016 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2017 about 10% faster.
2018
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002019- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2020 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2021
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002022- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2023 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2024 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2025 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2026
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002027Windows
2028-------
2029
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002030- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2031 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2032 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2033 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2034
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002035- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2036 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2037 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2038
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002039
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002040What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2041===============================
2042
2043*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2044
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002045IDLE
2046----
2047
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002048- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2049 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2050 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2051 context-menu actions.
2052
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002053- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2054 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2055 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2056 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2057 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2058 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2059 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2060 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2061 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2062
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002063
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002064What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2065=============================================
2066
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002067*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002068
2069Core and builtins
2070-----------------
2071
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002072- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002073 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002074 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2075
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002076Extension modules
2077-----------------
2078
2079- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2080 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2081 than once. This has been fixed.
2082
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002083- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2084 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2085 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2086 call.
2087
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002088- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2089
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002090Library
2091-------
2092
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002093- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2094 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2095
2096- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2097 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2098 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2099 restored.
2100
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002101IDLE
2102----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002103
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002104- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002105
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002106Build
2107-----
2108
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002109- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2110 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2111
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002112C API
2113-----
2114
2115Windows
2116-------
2117
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002118- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2119 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2120
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002121- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2122
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002123Mac
2124---
2125
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002126- Various fixes to pimp.
2127
2128- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2129
2130- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2131 more problems than it solves.
2132
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002133
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002134What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2135=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002136
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002137*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2138
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002139Core and builtins
2140-----------------
2141
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002142- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2143 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2144
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002145- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2146 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002147 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002148
2149- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2150 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2151 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002152 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002153
2154- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2155 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002156
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002157- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2158 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2159 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2160
2161- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002162 770247.
2163
2164- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002165
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002166Extension modules
2167-----------------
2168
2169- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2170 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2171
2172- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2173
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002174- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2175
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002176- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2177 contained within the _strptime module.
2178
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002179- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2180 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2181
2182- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002183 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2184
2185- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2186 the find_class attribute, if present.
2187
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002188- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002189
2190 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2191 (SF bug 763298).
2192
2193 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002194 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2195 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2196 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002197
2198 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2199
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002200Library
2201-------
2202
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002203- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2204
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002205- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2206 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2207 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2208 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2209 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2210 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2211 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2212 or Tester().
2213
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002214- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2215 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2216 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2217 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2218 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2219 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2220 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2221 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2222 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002223
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002224 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002225
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002226- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2227 weren't before was an oversight.
2228
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002229- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2230 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2231
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002232- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2233 when there are no lines.
2234
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002235- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2236 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2237
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002238- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2239 to child processes.
2240
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002241- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2242
2243- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2244
2245- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2246 xmlrpclib.
2247
2248- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2249 responses.
2250
2251- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2252 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2253
2254- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2255 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2256 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2257
2258- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2259 used as patterns.
2260
2261- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2262 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2263 than Tk 8.3.
2264
2265- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2266
2267- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002268
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002269Tools/Demos
2270-----------
2271
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002272- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2273
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002274- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2275
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002276- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002277
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002278Build
2279-----
2280
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002281- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2282
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002283- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2284
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002285- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2286 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002287
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002288- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2289 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2290 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002291
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002292C API
2293-----
2294
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002295- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2296 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2297
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002298Windows
2299-------
2300
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002301- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2302 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2303 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2304 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2305 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2306 Python exception ::
2307
2308 thread.error: can't start new thread
2309
2310 is raised now.
2311
2312- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2313 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2314 instead of from DLL teardown.
2315
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002316Mac
2317---
2318
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002319- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002320 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002321 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2322 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2323 the executable in the bundle.
2324
2325- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002326
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002327- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2328
2329- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2330 on Panther.
2331
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002332What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2333================================
2334
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002335*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002336
2337Core and builtins
2338-----------------
2339
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002340- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2341 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2342 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2343 with the -i option.
2344
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002345- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2346 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2347
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002348- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2349 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2350
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002351- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2352 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2353 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2354 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2355 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2356 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2357 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2358 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2359 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2360 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2361 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2362 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2363 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002364
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002365- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2366 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2367 embedded in a lambda expression.
2368
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002369- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2370 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2371 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2372 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2373 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2374
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002375- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2376 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2377 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2378
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002379- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2380 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2381
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002382- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2383 It's writable again.
2384
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002385- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2386 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2387 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002388 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002389
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002390- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2391 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2392 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2393
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002394Extension modules
2395-----------------
2396
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002397- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2398 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2399
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002400- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2401 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2402 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2403 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2404
2405- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2406 collection.
2407
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002408- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2409 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2410 unique within a single program run.
2411
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002412- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2413 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2414
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002415- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2416 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2417
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002418- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2419 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002420
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002421- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2422
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002423- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2424 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2425
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002426- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2427 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2428 for many BSD-derived systems.
2429
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002430
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002431Library
2432-------
2433
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002434- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2435 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2436 primary ones:
2437
2438 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2439 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2440 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2441
2442 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2443 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2444 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2445 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2446 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2447 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2448
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002449- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2450 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2451 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2452 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2453 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2454 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2455 argument.
2456
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002457- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2458 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2459 in the archive.
2460
2461- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2462 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2463
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002464- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2465 569574).
2466
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002467- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2468 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2469 no more.
2470
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002471- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2472 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2473 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2474 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2475 code coverage.
2476
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002477- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2478 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2479 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002480 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2481 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002482
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002483- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2484 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2485 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002486 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002487
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002488- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2489
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002490- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2491 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2492 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2493 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2494
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002495- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2496 handling.
2497
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002498- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2499 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2500
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002501- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2502 in socket.py.
2503
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002504- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2505
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002506- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2507 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2508 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2509 opener with proxy support.
2510
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002511- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2512
2513- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2514
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002515Tools/Demos
2516-----------
2517
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002518- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2519
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002520- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2521
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002522- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2523 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002524
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002525- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2526 files.
2527
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002528Build
2529-----
2530
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002531- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002532 different root directory.
2533
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002534C API
2535-----
2536
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002537- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2538 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2539 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2540 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2541 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2542 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2543 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2544 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2545 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2546 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2547
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002548- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2549 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2550 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2551 from Python.
2552
2553
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002554New platforms
2555-------------
2556
2557None this time.
2558
2559Tests
2560-----
2561
2562- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2563 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2564
2565Windows
2566-------
2567
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002568- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2569
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002570- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2571 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2572 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2573 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2574 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2575 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2576 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2577 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2578 that's what it's for.
2579
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002580Mac
2581---
2582
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002583- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2584 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2585 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2586 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002587- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2588 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2589- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002590
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002591SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2592------------------------------------
2593
2594430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2595598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2596622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2597661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2598683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2599697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2600713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2601724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2602727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2603729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2604730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2605731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2606732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2607733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2608735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2609740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2610744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2611745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2612747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2613749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2614751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2615753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2616755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2617757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2618760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2619
2620
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002621What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2622================================
2623
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002624*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002625
2626Core and builtins
2627-----------------
2628
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002629- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2630 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2631
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002632- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2633 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2634 and cannot be strings).
2635
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002636- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2637 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2638 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2639 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2640
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002641- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2642 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2643 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2644 Python itself.
2645
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002646- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2647 the referenced object, if it has one.
2648
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002649- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2650 the thread started at
2651 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2652
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002653- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2654 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2655 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2656 placed on a list index.
2657
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002658- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2659 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2660 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2661 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2662
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002663- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2664 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2665 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2666 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2667 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2668 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2669 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2670
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002671- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2672 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2673 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2674 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2675 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2676
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002677- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2678 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002679
2680- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2681 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2682 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2683 #693195.)
2684
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002685- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2686 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002687
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002688- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002689 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002690 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2691 interpreter executions, would fail.
2692
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002693- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002694 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002695 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002696
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002697Extension modules
2698-----------------
2699
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002700- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2701 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2702 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2703 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2704
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002705- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2706 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2707
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002708- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2709 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2710 and Greg Chapman.)
2711
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002712- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2713 recursively.
2714
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002715- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002716 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2717 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2718 leaks.
2719
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002720- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2721
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002722- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2723 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2724 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2725 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2726 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2727 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2728 #705836.
2729
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002730- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002731 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2732
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002733- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2734 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2735 See SF bug #692416.
2736
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002737- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2738 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2739
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002740- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2741 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2742 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002743
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002744- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002745 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2746 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2747
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002748- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2749 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2750 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2751 timeouts to work properly.
2752
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002753Library
2754-------
2755
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002756- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2757 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2758 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2759 future release.
2760
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002761- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2762 for querying platform dependent features.
2763
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002764- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002765
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002766- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2767 pickle protocol versions.
2768
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002769- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2770 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2771 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2772
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002773- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2774
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002775- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2776 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2777 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2778 modules.
2779
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002780- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2781 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2782 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2783
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002784- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2785 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2786
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002787- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2788 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2789 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2790
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002791- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002792 MS Office extensions.
2793
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002794- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2795 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2796
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002797- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2798 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2799
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002800- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2801 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2802 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2803 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2804 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2805 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2806
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002807- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2808 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2809 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002810
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002811- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2812 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2813 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2814
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002815- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2816
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002817- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2818 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2819 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2820
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002821Tools/Demos
2822-----------
2823
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002824- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2825 See the module docstring for details.
2826
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002827Build
2828-----
2829
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002830- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2831 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002832
2833C API
2834-----
2835
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002836- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2837
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002838- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2839 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2840 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2841
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002842- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2843 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002844
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002845 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2846 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2847 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002848
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002849- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002850 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2851
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002852- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2853 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2854 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002855
2856New platforms
2857-------------
2858
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002859None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002860
2861Tests
2862-----
2863
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002864- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2865 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002866
2867Windows
2868-------
2869
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002870- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2871 function.
2872
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002873- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2874 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002875
2876Mac
2877---
2878
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002879- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2880 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002881
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002882- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2883 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002884
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002885- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2886 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2887 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002888
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002889- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002890 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2891 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002892
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002893- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2894 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002895
2896
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002897What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2898=================================
2899
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002900*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002901
2902Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002903-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002904
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002905- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2906 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2907 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2908
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002909- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2910 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2911 (SF patch #664376.)
2912
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002913- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2914 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2915 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2916 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2917 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2918 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002919 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002920
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002921- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2922 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2923 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2924 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002925 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002926
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002927- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2928 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2929 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2930 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2931 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2932 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2933 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2934 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2935 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2936 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2937 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2938
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002939- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2940 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2941 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2942 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2943 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2944 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2945
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002946- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2947 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2948
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002949- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2950 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2951 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2952 case.)
2953
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002954- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2955 passed as unicode strings.
2956
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002957- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2958 See SF bug #683467.
2959
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002960- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2961 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2962
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002963- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2964
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002965- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2966
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002967- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2968 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2969 arguments.
2970
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002971- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2972 See SF bug #667147.
2973
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002974- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002975 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002976 See SF bug #676155.
2977
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002978- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002979 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002980 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2981 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2982 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2983 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2984 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2985 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002986
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002987Extension modules
2988-----------------
2989
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002990- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2991 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2992 tp_as_number pointer.
2993
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002994- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2995 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2996 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2997 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2998 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2999
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003000- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3001
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003002- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3003
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003004- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003005 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003006 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3007 patch #678531.)
3008
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003009- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3010 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3011
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003012- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3013 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3014
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003015- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3016
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003017- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3018 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3019 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3020
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003021- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3022
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003023- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3024 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3025
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003026- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003027
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003028- datetime changes:
3029
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003030 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3031
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003032 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3033 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3034 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3035 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3036 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3037 now.
3038
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003039 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003040 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3041 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003042
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003043 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003044 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003045 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3046 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3047 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3048 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003049
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003050 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3051 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3052 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003053 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3054
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003055 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3056 by a later example coded by Guido.
3057
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003058 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003059 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3060 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3061 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003062 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3063 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3064
3065 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3066 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3067 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3068 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3069 tzinfo subclass instance.
3070
3071 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3072 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3073 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3074 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3075 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3076 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3077 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3078 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003079
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003080 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3081 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3082 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3083 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3084 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003085 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3086
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003087 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003088
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003089 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3090 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3091 as a naive datetime object.
3092
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003093 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3094 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3095 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3096
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003097 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3098 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3099 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3100 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3101 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3102 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3103 comparison.
3104
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003105 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3106 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3107 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3108 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003109 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003110
3111 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003112
3113 and ::
3114
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003115 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3116
3117 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3118 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3119 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3120 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3121
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003122 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3123 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3124 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3125 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3126 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3127
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003128 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3129 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003130 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3131 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003132
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003133Library
3134-------
3135
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003136- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3137 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3138
3139- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3140 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3141 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3142 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3143 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3144 See PEP 307 for details.
3145
3146- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3147 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3148
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003149- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3150 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003151 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003152 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3153 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003154 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003155
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003156- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3157 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3158
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003159- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3160 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3161 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3162
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003163- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3164
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003165- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3166 exception.
3167
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003168- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3169 class.
3170
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003171- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3172 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3173 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3174
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003175- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3176 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3177
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003178- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003179 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3180 See SF bug #659228.
3181
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003182- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3183 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3184 See SF patch #651082.
3185
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003186- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003187
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003188- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3189 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3190
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003191- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003192 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003193
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003194- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3195 DOS paths from other platforms.
3196
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003197Tools/Demos
3198-----------
3199
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003200- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3201 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3202 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3203 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3204 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3205 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3206 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3207 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3208 example:
3209
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003210 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3211 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003212
3213 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3214
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003215
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003216Build
3217-----
3218
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003219- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3220 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3221 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003222 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3223
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003224 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3225
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003226- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3227 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3228 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3229 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3230 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3231 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3232 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3233 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3234 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3235
3236- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3237 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3238 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3239 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3240
3241- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3242 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3243
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003244C API
3245-----
3246
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003247- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3248 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003249
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003250- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3251 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3252 tp_as_number pointer.
3253
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003254- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3255 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3256 (SF #681367)
3257
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003258- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3259 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3260 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3261 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003262
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003263Tests
3264-----
3265
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003266- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003267 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3268 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3269 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3270 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3271 pydoc.)
3272
3273- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3274
3275- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003276
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003277Windows
3278-------
3279
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003280- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3281 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3282 time).
3283
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003284- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3285 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3286
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003287- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3288 release without strong cryptography.
3289
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003290- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003291 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003292
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003293- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3294 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3295
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003296Mac
3297---
3298
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003299- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3300 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003301
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003302- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3303 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3304 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003305
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003306- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3307 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003308
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003309- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3310 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3311 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3312 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003313
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003314- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003315 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3316 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3317 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003318
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003319
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003320What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003321=================================
3322
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003323*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003324
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003325Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003326--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003327
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003328- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3329
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003330- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3331 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003332 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003333 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003334 a different meaning than before.
3335
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003336- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003337 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003338 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003339
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003340- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003341 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003342 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003343
3344- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3345 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3346 and deallocation.
3347
3348- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3349 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3350
3351- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3352 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3353 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3354 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3355 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3356
3357- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3358 now detected by the garbage collector.
3359
3360- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3361 [SF bug 519621]
3362
3363- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3364 identifier.
3365
3366- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3367 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3368 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3369 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3370 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3371 [SF bug 563060]
3372
3373- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3374 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3375 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3376 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3377 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3378
3379- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3380 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3381 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3382
3383- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3384
3385- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3386 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3387 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3388 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3389 state of the slots would be lost.)
3390
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003391Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003392-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003393
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003394- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003395 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3396 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3397 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3398 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003399 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3400 Jython 2.1.
3401
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003402- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003403 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003404 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3405 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3406 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3407 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3408 these, see PEP 302.
3409
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003410- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3411 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3412 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3413
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003414- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3415 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3416 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3417
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003418- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3419 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3420 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3421
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003422- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3423 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3424 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3425 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3426 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3427 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3428 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3429 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3430 releases or implementations.
3431
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003432- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003433 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3434 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003435
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003436- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3437 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3438
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003439- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3440 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3441 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3442
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003443- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3444 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3445
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003446- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3447 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003448 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3449 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003450
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003451- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3452 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3453 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3454 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3455 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3456
3457 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3458 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3459 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3460 pattern.
3461
3462 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3463 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3464 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3465 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3466
3467 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3468 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3469 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3470 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3471 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3472 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3473
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003474- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3475 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3476 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3477 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3478 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3479 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3480 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3481 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003482
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003483- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3484 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3485 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3486 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3487 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003488 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3489 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3490 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3491 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3492 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3493 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3494 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003495
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003496- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3497 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3498
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003499- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3500 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3501 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3502 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3503 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3504 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3505 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3506 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3507 to Zack Weinberg!
3508
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003509- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3510 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3511 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3512 type. This has been fixed now.
3513
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003514- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3515 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3516 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3517
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003518- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3519 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3520 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3521 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3522 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3523 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3524 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3525 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003526 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003527
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003528- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3529 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3530 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003531
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003532- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3533 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3534 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3535 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3536 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3537 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3538 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3539 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003540 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003541 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3542 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3543
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003544- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3545 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3546 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3547 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3548 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3549 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3550 this.)
3551
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003552- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3553 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003554 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003555 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003556 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3557 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003558 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3559 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003560
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003561- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3562 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3563 currently running.
3564
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003565- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3566 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3567 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3568 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3569
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003570- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3571 as directory names.
3572
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003573- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3574 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3575
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003576- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3577 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3578
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003579- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003580 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3581 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003582
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003583- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3584 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3585 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3586 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3587 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3588
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003589- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3590 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3591 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3592 removed.
3593
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003594- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3595 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3596 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3597
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003598- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3599 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3600 to __debug__.
3601
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003602- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3603 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3604 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3605
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003606- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3607 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3608 deprecated now.
3609
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003610- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3611 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3612 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003613
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003614- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3615 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3616 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3617 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3618 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003619
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003620- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3621 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3622
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003623- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3624 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3625 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003626 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003627 is backward compatible.
3628
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003629- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3630 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3631 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3632 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3633 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3634
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003635- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3636 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3637 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3638 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3639 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3640 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003641
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003642- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3643 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3644
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003645- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3646 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3647
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003648- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3649 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3650 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3651 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3652 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3653
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003654- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3655 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3656 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3657
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003658- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003659 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3660
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003661- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3662 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3663 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003664
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003665- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3666 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3667
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003668- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3669 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3670 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3671
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003672- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3673
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003674Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003675-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003676
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003677- Added three operators to the operator module:
3678 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3679 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3680 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3681
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003682- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3683
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003684- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3685 archives.
3686
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003687- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3688 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3689 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3690
3691 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3692
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003693- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3694 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3695 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003696 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003697
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003698- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3699 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3700 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3701 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003702 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3703 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3704 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3705 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003706
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003707- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3708 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003709
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003710- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3711
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003712- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3713 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3714
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003715- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3716 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3717 supported.
3718
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003719- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3720
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003721- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3722 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003723
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003724- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3725 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3726
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003727- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3728
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003729- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3730 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3731
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003732- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3733 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3734 functions but callable type objects.
3735
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003736- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003737 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003738 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003739
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003740- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3741 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003742
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003743- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3744 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003745
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003746- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3747 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3748 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3749 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3750
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003751- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3752 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003753
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003754- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3755 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3756 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3757 and __imul__.
3758
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003759- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003760 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3761 is called.
3762
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003763- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3764 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3765 interpreter was compiled.
3766
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003767- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3768 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3769 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003770 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003771 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3772 1, not 2.
3773
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003774- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3775 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3776 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3777 limit.
3778
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003779- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3780 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3781 bug #623464.
3782
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003783- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3784 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3785 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3786 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3787
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003788Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003789-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003790
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003791- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3792
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003793- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3794 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3795 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3796 with Python 2.3a2.
3797
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003798- os.path exposes getctime.
3799
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003800- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003801 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003802 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003803 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003804 unit tests of floating point results.
3805
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003806- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3807 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3808 has been increased.
3809
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003810- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3811 executed.
3812
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003813- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3814 postinstallation script.
3815
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003816- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3817 test the current module.
3818
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003819- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003820 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3821 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3822 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3823 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3824
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003825- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003826 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003827 Ward's Optik package.
3828
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003829- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3830 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3831 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3832 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3833
3834- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3835 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003836 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003837
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003838- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3839 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3840 shelf are binary pickles.
3841
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003842- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3843 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3844
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003845- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3846 modules are iterators now.
3847
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003848- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3849 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3850 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3851 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3852 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3853 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003854
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003855- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3856 with their entity value.
3857
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003858- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3859
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003860- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3861 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003862
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003863- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3864 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003865 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003866
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003867- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3868 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3869 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3870 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3871 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3872 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3873 main():
3874
3875 import locale
3876 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3877
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003878- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3879 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3880
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003881- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3882 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3883 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3884 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3885 to the new standard.
3886
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003887- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3888 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3889 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3890 an extension to the database.
3891
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003892- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3893 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3894 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3895 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003896 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003897
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003898- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003899 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003900
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003901- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3902 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3903 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3904 bounded integers.
3905
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003906- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3907 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3908 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3909 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3910 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3911 in existence.
3912
3913 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3914 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3915 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3916 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3917 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3918 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3919
3920 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3921 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3922 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3923 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3924
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003925- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3926 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3927 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3928
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003929- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3930
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003931- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3932 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3933 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3934 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3935
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003936- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3937 argument.
3938
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003939- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3940 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3941 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3942 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3943 [SF patch 560794].
3944
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003945- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3946 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3947 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003948 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3949 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3950 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003951
3952- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3953 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003954
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003955- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3956 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3957 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3958 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003959
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003960- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3961 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3962 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3963 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3964 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3965
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003966- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003967
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003968- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3969
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003970- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3971 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3972 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3973 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3974 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3975 identical to None.
3976
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003977- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3978 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3979 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3980 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3981 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3982 results now.
3983
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003984- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3985 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3986
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003987- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3988 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3989 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3990 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3991 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3992 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3993 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3994 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3995
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003996- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3997
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003998- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3999 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4000
4001- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4002 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4003 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4004 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4005 and other systems.
4006
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004007- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4008 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4009 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4010 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 +00004011 work well with these.
4012
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004013- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4014
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004015- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004016 connections.
4017
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004018- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4019 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4020 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4021
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004022- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4023 sets
4024
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004025- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4026 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4027 name.
4028
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004029- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4030 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4031 passed in.
4032
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004033- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004034 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004035 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4036 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004037
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004038- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4039
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004040- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4041
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004042- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4043 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4044 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4045
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004046- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4047 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4048 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4049 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004050 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004051
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004052- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004053 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004054 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004055
4056- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4057 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4058 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4059
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004060- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004061 the value of its expression argument.
4062
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004063- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4064 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4065 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4066
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004067- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4068 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4069 skipstone browser was included.
4070
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004071- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4072 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4073
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004074Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004075-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004076
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004077- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4078 names in addition to accepting file names.
4079
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004080- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4081 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4082 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4083 still used and useful.)
4084
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004085- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4086 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4087 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4088 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004089
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004090- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4091 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4092 the generated binary.
4093
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004094Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004095-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004096
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004097- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4098
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004099- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4100 except in the hands of experts.
4101
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004102- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004103 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4104 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4105 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004106
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004107- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4108 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4109 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4110 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4111 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4112 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4113 builds.
4114
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004115- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4116 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4117 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4118 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4119 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4120 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4121 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4122 new type.
4123
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004124- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004125
4126 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4127 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4128 positive infinities.
4129
4130 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4131 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4132 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4133 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4134 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4135 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4136 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4137
4138 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4139
4140 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4141
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004142- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4143 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4144 size of the executable.
4145
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004146- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4147 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4148 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4149 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004150
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004151- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4152
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004153- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4154 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4155 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004156
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004157- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4158 well as Unix.
4159
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004160- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4161 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4162 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4163 modules in the README file for details.
4164
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004165C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004166-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004167
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004168- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4169 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004170 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004171 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004172 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004173
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004174- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4175 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4176 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4177 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4178 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4179 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004180 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004181 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4182 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4183 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4184 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4185 aligned.)
4186
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004187- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4188 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4189 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4190
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004191- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4192 level.
4193
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004194- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4195 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4196 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4197 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4198 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4199
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004200- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4201 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4202 code.
4203
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004204- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4205 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4206 adjusting for negative indices.
4207
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004208- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4209 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4210 object.
4211
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004212- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4213 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4214 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4215
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004216- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4217 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004218
4219- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4220
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004221- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4222 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4223 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4224 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4225
4226- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4227
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004228- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004229
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004230- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004231 without going through the buffer API.
4232
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004233- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004234
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004235- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4236 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4237 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4238 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4239
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004240- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4241 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4242
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004243- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004244 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4245
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004246New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004247-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004248
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004249- OpenVMS is now supported.
4250
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004251- AtheOS is now supported.
4252
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004253- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4254
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004255- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4256
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004257Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004258-----
4259
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004260- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4261 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4262 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004263
4264Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004265-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004266
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004267- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4268 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4269 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4270 bugs.
4271 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004272 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004273 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4274 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004275 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004276
4277- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004278 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004279
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004280- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4281 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4282
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004283- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4284 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004285 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004286 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4287
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004288- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4289 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4290 use files" uninstall option).
4291
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004292- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4293
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004294- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4295 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4296
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004297- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4298 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4299 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4300
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004301- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4302 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4303 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4304 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4305 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004306 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4307 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4308 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004309
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004310- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004311 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004312 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4313 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4314 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4315 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4316 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4317 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4318 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4319 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4320 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4321 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4322 work around.
4323
4324- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4325 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4326 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4327 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4328 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4329 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4330 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4331 specified with O_CREAT too).
4332
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004333Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004334----
4335
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004336- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004337
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004338- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4339 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4340 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4341
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004342- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4343 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4344 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4345
4346- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4347 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4348 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4349 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4350 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4351 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4352 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4353 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004354
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004355- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4356 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4357 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004358
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004359- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4360 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4361 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4362 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4363 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004364
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004365- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4366 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4367 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004368
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004369- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4370 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004371
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004372- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4373 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4374 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4375 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4376 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004377
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004378- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4379 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4380 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4381
4382- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4383 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4384 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004385
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004386- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4387 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4388 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4389 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004390 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004391
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004392- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4393 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004394
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004395- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4396 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004397
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004398- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004399 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004400 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4401 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004402
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004403
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004404What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004405===============================
4406
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004407*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4408
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004409Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004410--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004411
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004412- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4413 with a custom metaclass.
4414
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004415Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004416-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004417
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004418- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4419 are proxies.
4420
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004421Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004422-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004423
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004424- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4425 very short strings.
4426
4427- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4428 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4429 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4430 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4431 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4432
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004433Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004434-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004435
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004436- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4437 close or delete time).
4438
4439- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4440 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4441
4442- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4443
4444- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004445 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004446
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004447Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004449
4450Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004451-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004452
4453C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004454-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004455
4456New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004457-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004458
4459Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004461
4462Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004463-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004464
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004465- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4466
4467- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4468 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4469
4470- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4471 deleted at process exit time.
4472
4473- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4474 in backslash.
4475
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004476Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004477----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004478
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004479- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4480 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4481 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4482
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004483
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004484What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004485===========================
4486
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004487*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4488
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004489Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004490--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004491
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004492- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4493 been extensively updated. See
4494
4495 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4496
4497 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4498
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004499- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4500 deleted!
4501
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004502- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4503 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4504 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4505 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4506 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4507
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004508- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4509
4510 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4511 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4512
4513 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4514 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4515 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4516 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4517 supported anyway.
4518
4519 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4520 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4521
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004522- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4523 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4524 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4525 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4526 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004527
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004528- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4529 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4530 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4531
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004532Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004533-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004534
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004535- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4536 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4537 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4538 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4539 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4540 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004541 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4542 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4543 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4544 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004545
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004546- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4547 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4548 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4549
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004550Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004551-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004552
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004553- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4554
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004555Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004556-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004557
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004558- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4559 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4560 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4561 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4562 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4563 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4564
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004565- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4566
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004567- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4568
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004569- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4570
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004571- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4572 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4573 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4574
4575- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4576
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004577Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004578-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004579
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004580- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4581 off a search on Google.
4582
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004583Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004584-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004585
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004586- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4587 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4588 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4589 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4590 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4591 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4592 other platforms should do likewise.
4593
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004594- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4595 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4596 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4597
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004598C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004599-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004600
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004601- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4602 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4603 producing key-value pairs.
4604
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004605- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004606 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004607 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4608 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4609 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4610 previously went unchallenged.
4611
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004612New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004613-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004614
4615Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004616-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004617
4618Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004619-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004620
4621Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004622----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004623
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004624- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4625 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004626
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004627- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4628 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4629 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4630 home.
4631
4632
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004633What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004634===========================
4635
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004636*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4637
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004638Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004639--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004640
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004641- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4642 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004643
4644 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004645 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004646
4647 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4648 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004649 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004650 This needs to be documented.
4651
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004652- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4653 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4654
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004655- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4656 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4657 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4658
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004659- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4660 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4661
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004662- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4663 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4664 class forbids it).
4665
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004666- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4667 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4668 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4669
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004670- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4671
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004672Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004673-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004674
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004675- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4676 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004677 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004678
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004679- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4680 (like 1 + '').
4681
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004682Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004683-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004684
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004685- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4686 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4687 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4688 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004689 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004690 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4691
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004692- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4693 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4694 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4695 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4696
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004697- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4698 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004699 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4700 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4701 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004702
4703- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4704 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004705
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004706- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4707 bytes on its input.
4708
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004709Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004710-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004711
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004712- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004713 convenience function.
4714
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004715- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4716 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4717 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004718 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4719 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4720 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4721 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4722 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4723 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004724
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004725- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4726 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4727 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4728 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4729
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004730- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4731 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4732 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4733
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004734- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4735 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4736 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4737 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4738
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004739- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4740 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004741 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004742 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4743 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4744 new -l and -e options.
4745
4746- statcache is now deprecated.
4747
4748- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4749 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004751 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4752 time properly taken into account.
4753
4754- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4755 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4756 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4757 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4758
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004759Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004760-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004761
4762Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004763-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004764
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004765- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4766 is built with libdb3 if available.
4767
4768- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4769
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004770C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004771-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004772
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004773- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4774 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4775 PySequence_Size().
4776
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004777- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4778
4779- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4780 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4781 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4782
4783- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4784 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4785
4786- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4787 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4788
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004789New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004790-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004791
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004792- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4793 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4794
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004795- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4796 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4797
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004798- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4799
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004800Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004801-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004802
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004803- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4804 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4805
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004806Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004807-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004808
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004809Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004810----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004811
4812- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4813 removed completely in the next release.
4814
4815- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4816 OSX.
4817
4818- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4819 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4820
4821- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4822
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004823
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004824What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004825===========================
4826
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004827*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4828
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004829Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004830--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004831
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004832- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004833 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004834 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004835 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4836 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004837 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4838 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004839 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4840 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004841
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004842- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4843 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4844
4845- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4846 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4847
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004848Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004849-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004850
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004851- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4852 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4853 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4854 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4855 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4856 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4857 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4858 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4859
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004860- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4861 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4862 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4863 example).
4864
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004865- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004866 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004867 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004868 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004869
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004870- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4871 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4872 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004873 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004874
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004875- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4876 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4877 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4878 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4879 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4880 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4881
4882 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4883
4884 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4885
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004886Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004887-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004888
4889- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4890
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004891- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4892
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004893- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4894 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004895
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004896- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4897 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4898 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4899 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4900 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4901 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004902 attributes.
4903
4904- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4905 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4906 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004907
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004908- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4909 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4910 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004911
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004912- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4913 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4914 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004915 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4916 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4917
4918- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4919 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004920
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004921Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004922-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004923
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004924- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4925 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4926
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004927- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4928 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4929 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4930 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4931
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004932- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4933 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4934 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4935 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4936
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004937 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4938 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4939 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4940 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4941 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4942 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4943 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4944 without losing information).
4945
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004946- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004947 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4948 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4949 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4950 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4951 module).
4952
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004953 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004954 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4955 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4956 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4957 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004958
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004959- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004960 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4961 encoding.
4962
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004963- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4964 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4965
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004966- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004967 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4968
4969- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4970 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4971 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4972 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4973
4974- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4975
4976- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4977 ON, and OFF.
4978
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004979- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4980 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4981
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004982Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004983-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004984
4985- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4986 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4987 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004988
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004989- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4990 been added: -X and -E.
4991
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004992Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004993-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004994
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004995- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4996 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4997
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004998C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004999-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005000
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005001- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5002 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5003 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5004 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5005 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5006
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005007- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5008 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5009 as long) arguments.
5010
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005011- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5012 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5013 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5014 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5015 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5016 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5017
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005018- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5019 input.
5020
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005021New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005022-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005023
5024Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005025-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005026
5027Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005028-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005029
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005030- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5031 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5032 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5033
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005034- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5035 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5036 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005037 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005038
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005039 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5040 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5041 import signal
5042 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005043
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005044 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005045 while 1:
5046 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005047 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005048 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5049 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5050 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5051 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005052
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005053
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005054What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5055===========================
5056
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005057*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5058
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005059Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005060--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005061
5062- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5063 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5064 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5065
5066- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5067 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5068 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5069 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5070 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5071 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5072 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005073
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005074- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005075 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005076 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5077 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5078 associate a docstring with a property.
5079
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005080- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5081 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5082 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5083 other built-in object types.
5084
5085- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5086 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5087 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5088 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5089 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5090
5091- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5092 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5093
5094- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5095 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005096 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005097 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5098 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5099 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5100 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5101 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5102
5103- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5104 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5105 class.
5106
5107- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5108 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5109 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5110 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5111
5112- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5113 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5114 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5115 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5116
5117- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5118 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5119
5120- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5121 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5122 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5123 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5124 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005125 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005126 with the same value as s.
5127
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005128- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5129
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005130Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005131----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005132
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005133- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5134
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005135- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5136 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5137 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5138 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5139 objects.
5140
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005141- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5142 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005143 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5144 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5145
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005146- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5147 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5148 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5149
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005150Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005151-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005152
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005153- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5154 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5155 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5156 by the instances.
5157
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005158- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5159 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5160 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5161
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005162- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5163 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5164 before the entire comparison is complete.
5165
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005166- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5167 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5168 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5169
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005170- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5171 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5172 getwriter().
5173
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005174- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5175 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5176
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005177- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005178 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5179 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5180
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005181- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5182 iterable object.
5183
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005184- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5185 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005186
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005187- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5188 authentication.
5189
5190- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5191 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005192
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005193- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005194 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5195 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5196 a sample driver.)
5197
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005198Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005199-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005200
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005201- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5202 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5203 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5204 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5205 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5206 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5207 kernel has large file support.
5208
5209- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5210 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5211 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5212 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5213 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5214
5215- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5216 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5217 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5218
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005219C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005220-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005221
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005222- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5223 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5224
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005225New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005226-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005227
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005228- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5229 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5230
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005231Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005232-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005233
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005234- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5235 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5236 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5237 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5238 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5239
5240- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5241 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5242 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5243 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5244
5245- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5246 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5247
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005248Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005249-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005250
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005251- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005252 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5253 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005254
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005255
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005256What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5257===========================
5258
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005259*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5260
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005261Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005262----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005263
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005264- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5265 big to represent as a C double.
5266
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005267- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5268 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5269 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5270 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5271 restriction).
5272
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005273- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5274 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5275 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5276 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5277 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5278
5279 >>> dir([])
5280 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5281 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5282 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5283 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5284 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5285 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5286 'reverse', 'sort']
5287
5288 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5289
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005290- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005291 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5292 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5293 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5294 OverflowError exception.
5295
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005296- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005297 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005298 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5299 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5300 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5301 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5302 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005303 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005304 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5305 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5306
5307 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5308 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5309 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5310 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005311
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005312- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005313 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5314 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5315 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5316 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5317 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5318 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5319 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5320 once it is created.
5321
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005322- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5323 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5324 (key, value) pairs.
5325
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005326- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005327 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5328 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5329
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005330- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5331 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5332 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5333 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5334 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005335
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005336- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005337 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5338 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5339
5340 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5341
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005342- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005343 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5344
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005345Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005346-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005347
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005348- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005349 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5350 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005351
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005352- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5353 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5354 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5355 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5356 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5357 in this area anymore).
5358
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005359- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5360 threading.Timer.
5361
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005362- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5363 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5364
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005365- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005366 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5367
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005368- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005369 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5370 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5371 converted to Python longs.
5372
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005373- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005374 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5375
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005376- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5377 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5378 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5379
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005380Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005381-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005382
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005383- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5384 division operators as per PEP 238.
5385
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005386Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005387-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005388
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005389- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5390 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5391 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5392 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5393
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005394C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005395-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005396
5397- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005398
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005399- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5400 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005401 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005402
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005403 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5404 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005405 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005406 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005407
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005408- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005409 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5410 module:
5411
5412 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005413
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005414 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5415 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005416
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005417 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5418 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005419
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005420 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5421
5422 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5423
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005424- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005425 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5426 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5427 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005428
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005429New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005430-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005431
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005432- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5433 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5434 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5435 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5436 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005437
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005438Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005439-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005440
5441Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005442-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005443
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005444- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5445 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5446 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5447 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005448 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5449 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5450 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5451 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5452 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005453
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005454- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005455 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5456
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005457
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005458What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5459===========================
5460
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005461*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5462
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005463Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005464-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005465
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005466- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5467 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5468
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005469- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5470 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5471 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005472
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005473- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5474 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5475 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5476 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005477
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005478- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5479
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005480- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005481
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005482Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005483-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005484
5485- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005486 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005487 the module docstring for details.
5488
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005489Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005490-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005491
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005492- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005493 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5494 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5495 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005496
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005497- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5498 Nick Mathewson.
5499
5500Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005501----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005502
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005503- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5504 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5505 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5506 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5507 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5508 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5509 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5510 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5511
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005512- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5513 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5514 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5515 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5516
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005517- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5518 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5519 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5520 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5521 come a long way).
5522
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005523- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5524 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5525 write filters for these warnings).
5526
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005527- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5528 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5529 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5530 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5531 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5532
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005533- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5534 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5535 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5536 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5537 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5538 older distribution.
5539
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005540Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005541-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005542
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005543- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5544 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005545 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005546
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005547- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5548 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5549 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5550
5551- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5552
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005553- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5554
5555- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5556
5557- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5558
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005559- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005560
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005561- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5562
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005563New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005564-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005565
5566C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005567-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005568
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005569- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5570 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5571 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5572 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5573 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5574 against buffer overruns.
5575
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005576- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005577 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5578 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005579 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5580 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5581 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5582
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005583- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5584 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5585 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5586 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5587 deprecated.
5588
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005589Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005590-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005591
5592- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5593 relevant is found.
5594
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005595
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005596What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005597===========================
5598
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005599*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5600
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005601Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005602----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005603
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005604- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5605 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5606 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5607 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5608 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5609 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5610 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5611 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005612 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005613 repaired.
5614
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005615- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005616 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005617 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5618 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5619 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5620 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5621 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5622 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5623 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5624 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5625
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005626- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5627 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5628 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5629 leading BMO character).
5630
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005631- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5632 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5633 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5634
5635 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5636 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5637 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005638
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005639 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5640 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5641 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5642 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5643 for various simple to use conversions.
5644
5645 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5646 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5647
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005648 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5649 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5650 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5651 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5652 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5653 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5654 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5655 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5656 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5657 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5658 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5659 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5660 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5661 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5662 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005663
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005664- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5665 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5666 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005667 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005668 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005669
5670 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005671 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5672 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5673 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5674 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5675 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005676 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5677 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005678
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005679 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5680 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5681 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005682 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005683
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005684- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5685 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5686 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5687 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5688 floating arithmetic,
5689
5690 x = 9007199254740992.0
5691 print long(x)
5692
5693 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5694 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5695 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5696 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5697 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5698 functions are of good quality).
5699
5700 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5701 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5702 algorithms to break.
5703
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005704- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5705 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5706 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5707 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5708 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5709 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5710 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5711 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5712 order.
5713
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005714- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5715 operation along the most common code paths.
5716
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005717- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5718 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5719
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005720- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5721 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5722 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5723 {}.update(UserDict())
5724
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005725- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5726 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5727 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5728 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5729 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5730 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5731 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5732 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5733
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005734- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005735 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005736
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005737 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005738 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5739 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005740 join() method of strings
5741 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005742 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5743 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005744 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005745 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005746
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005747- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5748 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5749
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005750- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5751 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5752
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005753- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5754 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5755 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5756 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5757
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005758- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5759 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005760 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005761 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5762 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005763
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005764- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5765
5766
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005767Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005768-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005769
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005770- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005771 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005772 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5773 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5774
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005775- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5776 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5777
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005778- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5779 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5780 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5781 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5782
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005783- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5784 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5785 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5786
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005787- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5788
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005789- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5790
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005791- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5792 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5793 that are still imported into string.py).
5794
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005795- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5796
5797- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5798 Now it does.
5799
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005800- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5801
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005802- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5803 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5804 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5805 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5806 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005807 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5808 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005809
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005810- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5811 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5812 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5813 'help(object)'.
5814
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005815Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005816-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005817
5818- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005819 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005820 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5821 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5822
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005823- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005824 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5825 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005826
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005827C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005828-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005829
5830- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5831 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005832
5833----
5834
5835**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**