blob: 3dac4a87d1f7052a9d07c886d92ee80df2ff06a8 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XXXX-XX-XX*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwis729d47d2004-09-20 06:17:46 +000015- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000016
17Extension modules
18-----------------
19
20...
21
22Library
23-------
24
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +000025- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
26 applications should use the getmember function.
27
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +000028- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
29
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +000030- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
31 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
32 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
33 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
34 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
35 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
36 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
37 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
38 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
39
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000040- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
41 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +000042 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000043
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000044- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
45 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
46 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
47 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
48 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
49 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
50 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
51 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000052
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +000053- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000054 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
55 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
56 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
57 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
58 integration features instead. It would help if those were documented.
59
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +000060- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
61
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000062Build
63-----
64
65...
66
67C API
68-----
69
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000070- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
71 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
72 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000073
74Documentation
75-------------
76
77...
78
79Tests
80-----
81
82- test__locale ported to unittest
83
84Windows
85-------
86
87...
88
89Mac
90---
91
92...
93
94New platforms
95-------------
96
97...
98
99Tools/Demos
100-----------
101
102...
103
104
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000105What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
106=================================
107
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000108*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000109
110Core and builtins
111-----------------
112
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000113- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000114 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
115
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000116- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
117 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
118 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
119 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
120 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
121 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
122 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
123 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000124 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
125 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
126 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
127 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
128 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000129
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000130- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
131 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
132 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
133 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
134 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
135
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000136- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
137
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000138- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
139 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
140
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000141- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
142 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
143 modified the list.
144
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000145- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
146 functions is now writable.
147
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000148- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
149 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
150 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
151 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
152
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000153- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
154 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
155 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
156 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
157 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000158
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000159- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
160 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
161
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000162Extension modules
163-----------------
164
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000165- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
166
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000167- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
168 data.
169
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000170- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
171 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
172 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
173 supposed to have been truncated away.
174
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000175- Added socket.socketpair().
176
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000177- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
178 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
179
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000180- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000181 versions of Python, have now been removed.
182
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000183Library
184-------
185
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000186- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000187 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000188
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000189- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
190 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
191
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000192- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
193 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
194
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000195- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
196
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000197- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
198 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000199
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000200- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
201 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
202
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000203- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
204
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000205- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
206
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000207- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
208
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000209- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
210 Percivall.
211
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000212- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
213 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
214
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000215- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
216 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
217 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000218 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000219
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000220- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
221 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
222 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
223 and exponent.
224
225- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
226
227- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
228 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
229 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
230
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000231- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
232 to the readline module.
233
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000234- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000235 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
236 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000237
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000238- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
239 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
240 contains symlinks.
241
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000242- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
243 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
244
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000245- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
246 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
247 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
248
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000249- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
250 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
251 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
252 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
253 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
254 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
255 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
256 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
257 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
258 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
259 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
260 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
261 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
262
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000263- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
264
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000265Tools/Demos
266-----------
267
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000268- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
269 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
270
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000271- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
272
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000273Build
274-----
275
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000276- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
277 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
278 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
279 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
280 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
281 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
282 plans to do so.
283
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000284- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
285 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
286
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000287- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
288 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
289
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000290- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
291 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
292
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000293- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
294 GNU/k*BSD systems.
295
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000296- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
297 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
298
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000299C API
300-----
301
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000302..
303
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000304Documentation
305-------------
306
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000307- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
308 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
309
310- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
311 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
312 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000313
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000314New platforms
315-------------
316
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000317- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
318
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000319Tests
320-----
321
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000322..
323
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000324Windows
325-------
326
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000327- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
328 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
329 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
330 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
331 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
332 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
333 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
334 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
335 the problem.
336
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000337Mac
338---
339
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000340..
341
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000342
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000343What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
344=================================
345
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000346*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000347
348Core and builtins
349-----------------
350
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000351- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
352 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
353 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
354 sensitive code.
355
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000356- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000357 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000358
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000359 @staticmethod
360 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000361
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000362 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000363
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000364- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
365 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
366 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
367 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
368 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
369 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
370 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
371 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
372 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
373 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
374 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
375
376 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
377 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
378 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
379 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
380 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
381 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
382 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
383
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000384- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
385 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
386
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000387- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000388 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000389
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000390- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000391 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000392 which was missing for no apparent reason.
393
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000394- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000395 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
396 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
397
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000398- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
399 types that support garbage collection.
400
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000401- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
402
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000403- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
404 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
405 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
406 Jython.
407
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000408- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
409
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000410- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
411 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
412
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000413- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
414 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
415 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000416
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000417- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
418 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
419 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
420
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000421Extension modules
422-----------------
423
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000424- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
425
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000426Library
427-------
428
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000429- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
430 TIS-620
431
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000432- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
433 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
434 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
435 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
436 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
437 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
438 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
439 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
440 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
441 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
442
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000443- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
444
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000445- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
446 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
447 same as when the argument is omitted).
448 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
449
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000450- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
451
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000452- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
453 schemes are offered.
454
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000455- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
456
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000457- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
458 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
459 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
460
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000461- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
462
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000463- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
464 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
465
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000466- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
467 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
468 when dummy_threading is being used.
469
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000470- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
471 from a tarfile.
472
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000473- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000474 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000475
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000476- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
477 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
478 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
479 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
480
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000481- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
482 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
483
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000484- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
485 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
486 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
487 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
488 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
489 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
490 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
491 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
492 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
493 by some other method in progress).
494
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000495- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
496 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
497 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000498
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000499- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
500
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000501- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
502 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
503 AM Kuchling.
504
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000505- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
506 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
507 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
508
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000509- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
510 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
511 instead of unsigned.
512
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000513- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000514 no longer part of the public API.
515
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000516- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
517 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
518 string methods of the same name).
519
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000520- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000521 SF patch 945642.
522
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000523- doctest unittest integration improvements:
524
525 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
526
527 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
528 DocTestSuites.
529
530- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
531 that provide thread-local data.
532
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000533- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
534 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
535
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000536- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
537
538- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
539 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
540 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
541
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000542- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
543
544 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
545 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
546 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000547
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000548 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
549 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
550 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
551 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
552
553 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
554 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
555
556 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
557 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
558 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
559 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
560
561 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
562 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
563 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
564 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
565 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
566
567 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
568 wrapping help output.
569
570 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
571 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
572 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000573
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000574C API
575-----
576
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000577- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
578 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
579 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
580 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
581 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
582 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
583 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
584 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
585 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
586 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
587 its visible semantics have not changed.
588
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000589- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
590 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
591
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000592Documentation
593-------------
594
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000595- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000596
597 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000598 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000599
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000600 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000601
602 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
603
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000604- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000605
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000606Tests
607-----
608
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000609- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000610 platforms that use the Makefile.
611
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000612- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
613 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
614 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
615
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000616
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000617What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
618=================================
619
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000620*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000621
622Core and builtins
623-----------------
624
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000625- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
626 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
627 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
628 objects now (one object instead of three).
629
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000630- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
631 Windows DLLs.
632
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000633- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
634 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000635
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000636- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
637 a new .pyc magic.
638
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000639- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
640 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
641 be there.
642
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000643- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
644 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
645 the LC_NUMERIC category.
646
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000647- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
648 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
649 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
650
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000651- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
652
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000653- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
654 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
655 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000656
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000657- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
658 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
659
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000660- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
661
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000662- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000663 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000664
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000665- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
666
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000667- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
668
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000669- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
670 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
671
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000672- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
673 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
674 Fixes bug #858016 .
675
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000676- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
677 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
678 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
679
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000680- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
681 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
682 improves their performance (about 35%).
683
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000684- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
685 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
686 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
687
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000688- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
689 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
690 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
691 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
692
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000693- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
694 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
695 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
696 length is not known).
697
698- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
699 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000700 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
701 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000702 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
703
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000704- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
705 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
706
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000707- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
708 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
709 keyword arguments.
710
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000711- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
712 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
713 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
714
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000715- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
716 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
717 cases.
718
719- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
720 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
721 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
722 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
723 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
724 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
725 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
726 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
727 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
728 a release build.
729
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000730- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
731 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
732
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000733- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000734 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000735
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000736- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
737 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
738 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
739 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
740 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
741 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
742 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
743 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
744 destroyed.
745
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000746- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
747 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
748 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
749 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
750 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
751 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
752 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
753 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
754
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000755- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
756 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
757 character other than a space.
758
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000759- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
760 by the function object or by the method object, the function
761 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
762 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
763 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
764 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
765 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
766 attributes with the same name.
767
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000768- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
769 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
770 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
771 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
772 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
773 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
774 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
775 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
776 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
777 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
778 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
779 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
780 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
781 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000782
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000783- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
784 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
785 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
786 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
787 This has been repaired.
788
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000789- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
790
791- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
792
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000793- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
794 over a sequence.
795
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000796- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000797 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000798
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000799- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
800
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000801- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
802 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
803 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
804 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
805 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
806 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
807 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
808 records with equal keys is unchanged).
809
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000810- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
811 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
812 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
813
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000814- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
815 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
816 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
817 freelist.
818
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000819- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
820 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
821
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000822- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
823 number.
824
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000825- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
826 a TypeError exception.
827
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000828- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
829 820195.
830
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000831- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
832 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
833 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
834
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000835- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000836 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
837 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000838
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000839- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
840 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
841 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
842
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000843- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
844 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000845 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000846
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000847- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000848 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
849 the first call.
850
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000851
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000852Extension modules
853-----------------
854
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000855- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
856 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
857
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000858- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
859 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
860 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
861 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
862 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
863 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
864 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000865
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000866- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
867
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000868- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
869
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000870- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
871 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
872
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000873- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
874 fewer false positives.
875
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000876- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
877 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
878
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000879- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000880 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
881
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000882- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000883 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000884 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000885 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
886 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000887
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000888- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
889 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
890 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
891 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
892
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000893- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
894 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
895 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
896 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
897 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
898 #897625.
899
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000900- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
901 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
902
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000903- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
904 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
905 and pops on either side of the deque.
906
907- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
908 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
909
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000910- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
911 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
912 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
913 other functions that expect a function argument.
914
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000915- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
916
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000917- os.getsid was added.
918
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000919- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
920 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
921 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
922
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000923- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
924
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000925- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
926
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000927- readline.clear_history was added.
928
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000929- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
930
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000931- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
932
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000933- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
934
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000935- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
936
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000937- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
938
939- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
940
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000941- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
942
943- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
944
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000945- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
946 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
947 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
948
949- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
950 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
951 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
952 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
953 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
954 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
955 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
956
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000957- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
958 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
959 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
960 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000961
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000962- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000963 iterators from a single iterable.
964
965- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
966 of raising a TypeError exception.
967
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000968- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
969 as parameter.
970
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000971Library
972-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000973
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000974- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
975 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
976 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000977
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000978- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
979 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
980 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000981
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000982- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000983
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000984- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
985 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000986
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000987- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
988 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
989
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000990- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
991
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000992- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000993 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000994
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000995- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000996 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000997
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000998- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
999
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001000- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1001 on cygwin and mingw32.
1002
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001003- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1004
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001005- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1006 module.
1007
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001008- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1009 installation scheme for all platforms.
1010
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001011- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001012 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001013
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001014- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1015 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1016 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1017
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001018- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1019 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1020 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1021
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001022- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1023
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001024- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1025
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001026- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1027 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1028
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001029- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1030 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1031 type pattern with the same value exists.
1032
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001033- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1034 when run from the command prompt).
1035
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001036- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1037 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1038
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001039- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1040 default sort).
1041
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001042- Added global runctx function to profile module
1043
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001044- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1045
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001046- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1047
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001048- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1049
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001050- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001051 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1052 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1053 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1054 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1055 accordingly.
1056
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001057- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1058 decoding standards.
1059
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001060- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1061 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1062 called for all requests.
1063
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001064- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1065 they are passed to the compiler.
1066
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001067- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1068 indent, width and depth.
1069
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001070- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1071 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1072
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001073- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1074 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1075
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001076- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1077
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001078- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1079
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001080- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1081
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001082- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1083 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1084
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001085- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001086 for better performance.
1087
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001088- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001089
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001090- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1091 a string).
1092
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001093- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1094
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001095- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1096
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001097- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1098
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001099- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1100
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001101- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1102 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1103 list of fieldnames.
1104
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001105- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1106 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1107
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001108- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1109
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001110- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1111 empty lists.
1112
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001113- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1114 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1115 and shelves.
1116
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001117- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1118 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1119
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001120- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001121 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1122 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001123
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001124- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1125 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001126 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001127
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001128- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001129 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1130 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1131
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001132- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1133 and removed in Py2.4.
1134
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001135- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1136
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001137- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1138
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001139Tools/Demos
1140-----------
1141
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001142- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1143 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1144
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001145- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1146
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001147- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1148 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1149 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1150 destination in situations where both files are given.
1151
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001152- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1153 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1154 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1155 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1156
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001157- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1158
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001159- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1160 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1161 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1162 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1163 now.
1164
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001165- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1166 in effect
1167
1168- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1169 C-c C-h
1170
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001171- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1172 -d option was given.
1173
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001174Build
1175-----
1176
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001177- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1178 build under OS X.
1179
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001180- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1181 --enable-profiling.
1182
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001183- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1184 is configured --with-tsc.
1185
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001186- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1187 on AMD64.
1188
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001189- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1190 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1191
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001192- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1193 removed.
1194
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001195- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1196 supported (see PEP 11).
1197
1198- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1199
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001200- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1201
1202- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1203 (see PEP 11).
1204
1205- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1206 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1207
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001208C API
1209-----
1210
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001211- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1212 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1213 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1214
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001215- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1216 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1217 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1218 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1219
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001220- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1221 generator objects.
1222
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001223- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1224 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001225 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1226 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001227
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001228- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1229 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1230
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001231- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1232 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1233 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1234 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1235 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1236
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001237- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1238 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1239 about 10% faster.
1240
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001241- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1242 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1243
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001244- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1245 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1246 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1247 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1248
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001249Windows
1250-------
1251
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001252- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1253 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1254 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1255 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1256
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001257- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1258 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1259 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1260
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001261
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001262What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1263===============================
1264
1265*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1266
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001267IDLE
1268----
1269
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001270- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1271 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1272 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1273 context-menu actions.
1274
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001275- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1276 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1277 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1278 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1279 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1280 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1281 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1282 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1283 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1284
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001285
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001286What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1287=============================================
1288
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001289*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001290
1291Core and builtins
1292-----------------
1293
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001294- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001295 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001296 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1297
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001298Extension modules
1299-----------------
1300
1301- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1302 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1303 than once. This has been fixed.
1304
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001305- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1306 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1307 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1308 call.
1309
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001310- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1311
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001312Library
1313-------
1314
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001315- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1316 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1317
1318- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1319 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1320 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1321 restored.
1322
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001323IDLE
1324----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001325
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001326- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001327
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001328Build
1329-----
1330
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001331- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1332 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1333
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001334C API
1335-----
1336
1337Windows
1338-------
1339
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001340- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1341 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1342
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001343- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1344
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001345Mac
1346---
1347
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001348- Various fixes to pimp.
1349
1350- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1351
1352- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1353 more problems than it solves.
1354
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001355
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001356What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1357=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001358
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001359*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1360
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001361Core and builtins
1362-----------------
1363
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001364- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1365 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1366
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001367- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1368 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001369 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001370
1371- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1372 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1373 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001374 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001375
1376- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1377 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001378
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001379- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1380 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1381 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1382
1383- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001384 770247.
1385
1386- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001387
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001388Extension modules
1389-----------------
1390
1391- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1392 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1393
1394- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1395
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001396- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1397
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001398- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1399 contained within the _strptime module.
1400
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001401- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1402 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1403
1404- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001405 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1406
1407- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1408 the find_class attribute, if present.
1409
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001410- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001411
1412 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1413 (SF bug 763298).
1414
1415 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001416 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1417 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1418 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001419
1420 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1421
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001422Library
1423-------
1424
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001425- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1426
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001427- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1428 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1429 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1430 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1431 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1432 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1433 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1434 or Tester().
1435
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001436- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1437 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1438 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1439 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1440 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1441 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1442 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1443 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1444 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001445
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001446 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001447
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001448- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1449 weren't before was an oversight.
1450
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001451- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1452 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1453
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001454- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1455 when there are no lines.
1456
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001457- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1458 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1459
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001460- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1461 to child processes.
1462
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001463- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1464
1465- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1466
1467- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1468 xmlrpclib.
1469
1470- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1471 responses.
1472
1473- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1474 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1475
1476- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1477 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1478 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1479
1480- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1481 used as patterns.
1482
1483- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1484 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1485 than Tk 8.3.
1486
1487- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1488
1489- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001490
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001491Tools/Demos
1492-----------
1493
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001494- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1495
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001496- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1497
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001498- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001499
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001500Build
1501-----
1502
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001503- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1504
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001505- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1506
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001507- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1508 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001509
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001510- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1511 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1512 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001513
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001514C API
1515-----
1516
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001517- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1518 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1519
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001520Windows
1521-------
1522
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001523- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1524 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1525 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1526 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1527 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1528 Python exception ::
1529
1530 thread.error: can't start new thread
1531
1532 is raised now.
1533
1534- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1535 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1536 instead of from DLL teardown.
1537
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001538Mac
1539---
1540
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001541- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001542 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001543 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1544 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1545 the executable in the bundle.
1546
1547- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001548
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001549- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1550
1551- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1552 on Panther.
1553
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001554What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1555================================
1556
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001557*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001558
1559Core and builtins
1560-----------------
1561
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001562- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1563 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1564 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1565 with the -i option.
1566
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001567- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1568 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1569
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001570- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1571 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1572
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001573- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1574 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1575 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1576 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1577 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1578 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1579 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1580 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1581 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1582 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1583 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1584 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1585 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001586
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001587- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1588 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1589 embedded in a lambda expression.
1590
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001591- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1592 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1593 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1594 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1595 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1596
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001597- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1598 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1599 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1600
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001601- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1602 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1603
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001604- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1605 It's writable again.
1606
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001607- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1608 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1609 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001610 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001611
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001612- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1613 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1614 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1615
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001616Extension modules
1617-----------------
1618
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001619- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1620 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1621
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001622- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1623 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1624 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1625 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1626
1627- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1628 collection.
1629
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001630- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1631 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1632 unique within a single program run.
1633
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001634- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1635 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1636
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001637- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1638 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1639
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001640- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1641 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001642
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001643- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1644
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001645- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1646 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1647
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001648- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1649 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1650 for many BSD-derived systems.
1651
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001652
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001653Library
1654-------
1655
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001656- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1657 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1658 primary ones:
1659
1660 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1661 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1662 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1663
1664 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1665 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1666 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1667 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1668 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1669 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1670
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001671- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1672 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1673 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1674 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1675 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1676 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1677 argument.
1678
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001679- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1680 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1681 in the archive.
1682
1683- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1684 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1685
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001686- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1687 569574).
1688
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001689- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1690 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1691 no more.
1692
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001693- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1694 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1695 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1696 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1697 code coverage.
1698
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001699- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1700 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1701 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001702 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1703 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001704
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001705- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1706 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1707 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001708 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001709
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001710- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1711
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001712- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1713 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1714 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1715 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1716
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001717- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1718 handling.
1719
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001720- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1721 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1722
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001723- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1724 in socket.py.
1725
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001726- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1727
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001728- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1729 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1730 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1731 opener with proxy support.
1732
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001733- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1734
1735- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1736
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001737Tools/Demos
1738-----------
1739
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001740- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1741
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001742- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1743
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001744- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1745 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001746
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001747- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1748 files.
1749
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001750Build
1751-----
1752
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001753- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001754 different root directory.
1755
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001756C API
1757-----
1758
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001759- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1760 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1761 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1762 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1763 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1764 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1765 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1766 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1767 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1768 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1769
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001770- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1771 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1772 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1773 from Python.
1774
1775
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001776New platforms
1777-------------
1778
1779None this time.
1780
1781Tests
1782-----
1783
1784- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1785 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1786
1787Windows
1788-------
1789
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001790- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1791
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001792- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1793 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1794 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1795 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1796 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1797 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1798 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1799 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1800 that's what it's for.
1801
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001802Mac
1803---
1804
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001805- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1806 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1807 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1808 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001809- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1810 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1811- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001812
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001813SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1814------------------------------------
1815
1816430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1817598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1818622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1819661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1820683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1821697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1822713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1823724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1824727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1825729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1826730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1827731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1828732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1829733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1830735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1831740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1832744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1833745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1834747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1835749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1836751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1837753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1838755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1839757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1840760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1841
1842
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001843What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1844================================
1845
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001846*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001847
1848Core and builtins
1849-----------------
1850
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001851- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1852 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1853
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001854- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1855 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1856 and cannot be strings).
1857
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001858- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1859 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1860 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1861 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1862
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001863- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1864 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1865 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1866 Python itself.
1867
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001868- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1869 the referenced object, if it has one.
1870
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001871- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1872 the thread started at
1873 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1874
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001875- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1876 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1877 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1878 placed on a list index.
1879
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001880- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1881 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1882 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1883 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1884
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001885- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1886 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1887 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1888 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1889 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1890 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1891 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1892
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001893- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1894 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1895 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1896 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1897 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1898
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001899- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1900 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001901
1902- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1903 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1904 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1905 #693195.)
1906
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001907- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1908 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001909
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001910- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001911 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001912 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1913 interpreter executions, would fail.
1914
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001915- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001916 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001917 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001918
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001919Extension modules
1920-----------------
1921
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001922- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1923 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1924 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1925 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1926
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001927- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1928 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1929
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001930- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1931 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1932 and Greg Chapman.)
1933
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001934- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1935 recursively.
1936
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001937- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001938 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1939 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1940 leaks.
1941
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001942- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1943
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001944- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1945 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1946 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1947 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1948 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1949 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1950 #705836.
1951
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001952- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001953 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1954
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001955- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1956 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1957 See SF bug #692416.
1958
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001959- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1960 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1961
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001962- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1963 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1964 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001965
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001966- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001967 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1968 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1969
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001970- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1971 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1972 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1973 timeouts to work properly.
1974
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001975Library
1976-------
1977
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001978- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1979 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1980 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1981 future release.
1982
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001983- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1984 for querying platform dependent features.
1985
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001986- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001987
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001988- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1989 pickle protocol versions.
1990
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001991- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1992 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1993 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1994
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001995- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1996
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001997- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1998 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1999 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2000 modules.
2001
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002002- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2003 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2004 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2005
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002006- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2007 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2008
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002009- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2010 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2011 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2012
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002013- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002014 MS Office extensions.
2015
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002016- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2017 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2018
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002019- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2020 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2021
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002022- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2023 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2024 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2025 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2026 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2027 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2028
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002029- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2030 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2031 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002032
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002033- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2034 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2035 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2036
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002037- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2038
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002039- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2040 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2041 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2042
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002043Tools/Demos
2044-----------
2045
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002046- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2047 See the module docstring for details.
2048
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002049Build
2050-----
2051
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002052- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2053 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002054
2055C API
2056-----
2057
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002058- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2059
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002060- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2061 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2062 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2063
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002064- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2065 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002066
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002067 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2068 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2069 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002070
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002071- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002072 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2073
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002074- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2075 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2076 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002077
2078New platforms
2079-------------
2080
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002081None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002082
2083Tests
2084-----
2085
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002086- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2087 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002088
2089Windows
2090-------
2091
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002092- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2093 function.
2094
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002095- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2096 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002097
2098Mac
2099---
2100
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002101- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2102 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002103
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002104- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2105 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002106
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002107- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2108 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2109 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002110
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002111- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002112 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2113 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002114
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002115- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2116 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002117
2118
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002119What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2120=================================
2121
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002122*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002123
2124Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002125-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002126
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002127- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2128 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2129 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2130
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002131- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2132 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2133 (SF patch #664376.)
2134
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002135- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2136 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2137 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2138 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2139 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2140 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002141 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002142
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002143- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2144 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2145 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2146 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002147 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002148
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002149- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2150 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2151 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2152 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2153 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2154 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2155 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2156 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2157 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2158 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2159 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2160
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002161- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2162 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2163 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2164 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2165 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2166 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2167
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002168- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2169 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2170
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002171- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2172 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2173 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2174 case.)
2175
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002176- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2177 passed as unicode strings.
2178
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002179- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2180 See SF bug #683467.
2181
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002182- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2183 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2184
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002185- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2186
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002187- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2188
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002189- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2190 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2191 arguments.
2192
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002193- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2194 See SF bug #667147.
2195
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002196- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002197 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002198 See SF bug #676155.
2199
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002200- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002201 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002202 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2203 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2204 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2205 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2206 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2207 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002208
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002209Extension modules
2210-----------------
2211
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002212- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2213 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2214 tp_as_number pointer.
2215
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002216- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2217 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2218 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2219 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2220 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2221
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002222- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2223
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002224- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2225
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002226- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002227 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002228 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2229 patch #678531.)
2230
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002231- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2232 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2233
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002234- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2235 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2236
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002237- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2238
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002239- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2240 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2241 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2242
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002243- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2244
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002245- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2246 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2247
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002248- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002249
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002250- datetime changes:
2251
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002252 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2253
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002254 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2255 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2256 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2257 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2258 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2259 now.
2260
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002261 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002262 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2263 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002264
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002265 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002266 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002267 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2268 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2269 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2270 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002271
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002272 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2273 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2274 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002275 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2276
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002277 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2278 by a later example coded by Guido.
2279
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002280 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002281 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2282 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2283 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002284 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2285 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2286
2287 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2288 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2289 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2290 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2291 tzinfo subclass instance.
2292
2293 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2294 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2295 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2296 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2297 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2298 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2299 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2300 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002301
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002302 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2303 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2304 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2305 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2306 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002307 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2308
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002309 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002310
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002311 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2312 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2313 as a naive datetime object.
2314
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002315 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2316 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2317 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2318
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002319 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2320 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2321 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2322 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2323 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2324 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2325 comparison.
2326
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002327 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2328 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2329 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2330 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002331 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002332
2333 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002334
2335 and ::
2336
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002337 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2338
2339 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2340 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2341 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2342 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2343
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002344 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2345 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2346 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2347 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2348 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2349
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002350 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2351 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002352 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2353 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002354
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002355Library
2356-------
2357
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002358- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2359 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2360
2361- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2362 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2363 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2364 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2365 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2366 See PEP 307 for details.
2367
2368- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2369 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2370
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002371- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2372 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002373 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002374 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2375 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002376 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002377
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002378- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2379 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2380
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002381- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2382 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2383 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2384
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002385- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2386
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002387- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2388 exception.
2389
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002390- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2391 class.
2392
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002393- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2394 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2395 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2396
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002397- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2398 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2399
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002400- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002401 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2402 See SF bug #659228.
2403
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002404- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2405 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2406 See SF patch #651082.
2407
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002408- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002409
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002410- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2411 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2412
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002413- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002414 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002415
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002416- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2417 DOS paths from other platforms.
2418
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002419Tools/Demos
2420-----------
2421
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002422- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2423 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2424 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2425 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2426 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2427 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2428 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2429 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2430 example:
2431
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002432 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2433 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002434
2435 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2436
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002437
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002438Build
2439-----
2440
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002441- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2442 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2443 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002444 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2445
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002446 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2447
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002448- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2449 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2450 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2451 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2452 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2453 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2454 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2455 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2456 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2457
2458- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2459 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2460 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2461 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2462
2463- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2464 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2465
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002466C API
2467-----
2468
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002469- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2470 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002471
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002472- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2473 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2474 tp_as_number pointer.
2475
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002476- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2477 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2478 (SF #681367)
2479
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002480- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2481 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2482 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2483 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002484
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002485Tests
2486-----
2487
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002488- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002489 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2490 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2491 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2492 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2493 pydoc.)
2494
2495- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2496
2497- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002498
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002499Windows
2500-------
2501
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002502- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2503 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2504 time).
2505
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002506- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2507 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2508
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002509- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2510 release without strong cryptography.
2511
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002512- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002513 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002514
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002515- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2516 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2517
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002518Mac
2519---
2520
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002521- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2522 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002523
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002524- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2525 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2526 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002527
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002528- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2529 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002530
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002531- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2532 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2533 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2534 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002535
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002536- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002537 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2538 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2539 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002540
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002541
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002542What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002543=================================
2544
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002545*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002546
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002547Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002548--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002549
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002550- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2551
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002552- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2553 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002554 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002555 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002556 a different meaning than before.
2557
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002558- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002559 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002560 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002561
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002562- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002563 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002564 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002565
2566- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2567 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2568 and deallocation.
2569
2570- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2571 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2572
2573- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2574 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2575 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2576 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2577 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2578
2579- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2580 now detected by the garbage collector.
2581
2582- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2583 [SF bug 519621]
2584
2585- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2586 identifier.
2587
2588- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2589 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2590 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2591 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2592 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2593 [SF bug 563060]
2594
2595- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2596 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2597 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2598 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2599 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2600
2601- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2602 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2603 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2604
2605- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2606
2607- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2608 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2609 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2610 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2611 state of the slots would be lost.)
2612
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002613Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002614-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002615
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002616- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002617 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2618 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2619 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2620 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002621 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2622 Jython 2.1.
2623
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002624- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002625 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002626 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2627 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2628 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2629 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2630 these, see PEP 302.
2631
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002632- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2633 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2634 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2635
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002636- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2637 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2638 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2639
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002640- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2641 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2642 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2643
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002644- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2645 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2646 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2647 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2648 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2649 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2650 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2651 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2652 releases or implementations.
2653
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002654- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002655 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2656 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002657
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002658- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2659 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2660
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002661- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2662 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2663 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2664
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002665- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2666 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2667
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002668- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2669 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002670 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2671 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002672
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002673- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2674 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2675 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2676 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2677 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2678
2679 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2680 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2681 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2682 pattern.
2683
2684 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2685 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2686 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2687 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2688
2689 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2690 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2691 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2692 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2693 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2694 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2695
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002696- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2697 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2698 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2699 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2700 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2701 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2702 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2703 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002704
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002705- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2706 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2707 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2708 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2709 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002710 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2711 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2712 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2713 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2714 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2715 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2716 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002717
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002718- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2719 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2720
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002721- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2722 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2723 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2724 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2725 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2726 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2727 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2728 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2729 to Zack Weinberg!
2730
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002731- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2732 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2733 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2734 type. This has been fixed now.
2735
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002736- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2737 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2738 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2739
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002740- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2741 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2742 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2743 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2744 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2745 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2746 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2747 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002748 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002749
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002750- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2751 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2752 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002753
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002754- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2755 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2756 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2757 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2758 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2759 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2760 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2761 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002762 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002763 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2764 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2765
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002766- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2767 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2768 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2769 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2770 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2771 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2772 this.)
2773
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002774- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2775 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002776 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002777 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002778 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2779 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002780 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2781 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002782
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002783- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2784 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2785 currently running.
2786
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002787- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2788 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2789 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2790 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2791
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002792- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2793 as directory names.
2794
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002795- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2796 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2797
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002798- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2799 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2800
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002801- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002802 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2803 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002804
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002805- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2806 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2807 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2808 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2809 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2810
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002811- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2812 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2813 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2814 removed.
2815
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002816- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2817 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2818 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2819
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002820- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2821 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2822 to __debug__.
2823
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002824- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2825 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2826 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2827
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002828- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2829 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2830 deprecated now.
2831
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002832- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2833 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2834 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002835
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002836- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2837 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2838 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2839 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2840 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002841
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002842- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2843 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2844
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002845- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2846 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2847 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002848 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002849 is backward compatible.
2850
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002851- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2852 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2853 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2854 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2855 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2856
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002857- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2858 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2859 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2860 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2861 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2862 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002863
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002864- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2865 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2866
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002867- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2868 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2869
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002870- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2871 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2872 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2873 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2874 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2875
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002876- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2877 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2878 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2879
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002880- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002881 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2882
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002883- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2884 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2885 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002886
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002887- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2888 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2889
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002890- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2891 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2892 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2893
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002894- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2895
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002896Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002897-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002898
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002899- Added three operators to the operator module:
2900 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2901 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2902 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2903
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002904- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2905
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002906- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2907 archives.
2908
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002909- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2910 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2911 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2912
2913 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2914
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002915- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2916 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2917 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002918 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002919
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002920- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2921 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2922 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2923 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002924 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2925 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2926 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2927 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002928
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002929- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2930 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002931
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002932- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2933
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002934- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2935 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2936
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002937- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2938 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2939 supported.
2940
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002941- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2942
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002943- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2944 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002945
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002946- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2947 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2948
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002949- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2950
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002951- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2952 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2953
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002954- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2955 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2956 functions but callable type objects.
2957
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002958- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002959 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002960 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002961
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002962- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2963 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002964
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002965- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2966 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002967
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002968- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2969 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2970 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2971 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2972
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002973- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2974 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002975
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002976- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2977 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2978 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2979 and __imul__.
2980
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002981- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002982 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2983 is called.
2984
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002985- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2986 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2987 interpreter was compiled.
2988
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002989- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2990 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2991 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002992 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002993 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2994 1, not 2.
2995
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002996- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2997 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2998 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2999 limit.
3000
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003001- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3002 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3003 bug #623464.
3004
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003005- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3006 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3007 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3008 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3009
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003010Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003011-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003012
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003013- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3014
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003015- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3016 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3017 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3018 with Python 2.3a2.
3019
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003020- os.path exposes getctime.
3021
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003022- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003023 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003024 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003025 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003026 unit tests of floating point results.
3027
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003028- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3029 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3030 has been increased.
3031
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003032- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3033 executed.
3034
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003035- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3036 postinstallation script.
3037
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003038- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3039 test the current module.
3040
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003041- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003042 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3043 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3044 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3045 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3046
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003047- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003048 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003049 Ward's Optik package.
3050
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003051- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3052 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3053 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3054 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3055
3056- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3057 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003058 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003059
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003060- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3061 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3062 shelf are binary pickles.
3063
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003064- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3065 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3066
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003067- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3068 modules are iterators now.
3069
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003070- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3071 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3072 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3073 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3074 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3075 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003076
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003077- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3078 with their entity value.
3079
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003080- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3081
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003082- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3083 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003084
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003085- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3086 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003087 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003088
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003089- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3090 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3091 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3092 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3093 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3094 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3095 main():
3096
3097 import locale
3098 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3099
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003100- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3101 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3102
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003103- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3104 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3105 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3106 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3107 to the new standard.
3108
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003109- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3110 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3111 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3112 an extension to the database.
3113
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003114- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3115 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3116 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3117 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003118 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003119
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003120- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003121 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003122
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003123- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3124 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3125 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3126 bounded integers.
3127
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003128- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3129 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3130 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3131 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3132 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3133 in existence.
3134
3135 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3136 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3137 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3138 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3139 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3140 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3141
3142 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3143 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3144 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3145 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3146
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003147- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3148 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3149 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3150
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003151- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3152
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003153- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3154 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3155 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3156 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3157
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003158- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3159 argument.
3160
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003161- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3162 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3163 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3164 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3165 [SF patch 560794].
3166
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003167- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3168 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3169 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003170 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3171 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3172 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003173
3174- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3175 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003176
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003177- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3178 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3179 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3180 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003181
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003182- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3183 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3184 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3185 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3186 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3187
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003188- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003189
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003190- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3191
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003192- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3193 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3194 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3195 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3196 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3197 identical to None.
3198
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003199- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3200 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3201 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3202 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3203 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3204 results now.
3205
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003206- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3207 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3208
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003209- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3210 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3211 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3212 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3213 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3214 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3215 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3216 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3217
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003218- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3219
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003220- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3221 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3222
3223- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3224 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3225 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3226 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3227 and other systems.
3228
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003229- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3230 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3231 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3232 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 +00003233 work well with these.
3234
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003235- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3236
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003237- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003238 connections.
3239
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003240- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3241 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3242 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3243
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003244- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3245 sets
3246
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003247- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3248 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3249 name.
3250
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003251- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3252 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3253 passed in.
3254
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003255- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003256 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003257 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3258 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003259
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003260- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3261
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003262- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3263
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003264- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3265 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3266 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3267
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003268- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3269 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3270 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3271 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003272 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003273
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003274- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003275 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003276 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003277
3278- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3279 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3280 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3281
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003282- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003283 the value of its expression argument.
3284
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003285- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3286 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3287 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3288
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003289- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3290 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3291 skipstone browser was included.
3292
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003293- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3294 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3295
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003296Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003297-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003298
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003299- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3300 names in addition to accepting file names.
3301
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003302- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3303 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3304 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3305 still used and useful.)
3306
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003307- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3308 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3309 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3310 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003311
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003312- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3313 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3314 the generated binary.
3315
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003316Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003317-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003318
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003319- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3320
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003321- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3322 except in the hands of experts.
3323
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003324- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003325 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3326 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3327 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003328
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003329- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3330 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3331 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3332 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3333 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3334 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3335 builds.
3336
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003337- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3338 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3339 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3340 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3341 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3342 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3343 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3344 new type.
3345
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003346- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003347
3348 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3349 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3350 positive infinities.
3351
3352 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3353 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3354 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3355 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3356 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3357 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3358 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3359
3360 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3361
3362 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3363
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003364- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3365 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3366 size of the executable.
3367
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003368- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3369 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3370 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3371 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003372
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003373- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3374
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003375- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3376 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3377 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003378
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003379- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3380 well as Unix.
3381
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003382- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3383 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3384 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3385 modules in the README file for details.
3386
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003387C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003388-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003389
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003390- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3391 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003392 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003393 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003394 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003395
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003396- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3397 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3398 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3399 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3400 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3401 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003402 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003403 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3404 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3405 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3406 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3407 aligned.)
3408
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003409- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3410 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3411 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3412
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003413- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3414 level.
3415
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003416- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3417 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3418 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3419 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3420 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3421
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003422- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3423 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3424 code.
3425
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003426- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3427 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3428 adjusting for negative indices.
3429
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003430- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3431 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3432 object.
3433
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003434- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3435 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3436 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3437
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003438- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3439 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003440
3441- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3442
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003443- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3444 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3445 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3446 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3447
3448- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3449
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003450- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003451
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003452- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003453 without going through the buffer API.
3454
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003455- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003456
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003457- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3458 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3459 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3460 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3461
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003462- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3463 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3464
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003465- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003466 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3467
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003468New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003469-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003470
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003471- OpenVMS is now supported.
3472
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003473- AtheOS is now supported.
3474
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003475- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3476
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003477- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3478
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003479Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003480-----
3481
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003482- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3483 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3484 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003485
3486Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003487-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003488
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003489- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3490 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3491 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3492 bugs.
3493 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003494 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003495 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3496 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003497 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003498
3499- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003500 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003501
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003502- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3503 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3504
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003505- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3506 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003507 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003508 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3509
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003510- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3511 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3512 use files" uninstall option).
3513
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003514- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3515
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003516- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3517 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3518
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003519- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3520 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3521 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3522
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003523- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3524 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3525 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3526 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3527 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003528 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3529 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3530 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003531
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003532- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003533 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003534 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3535 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3536 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3537 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3538 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3539 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3540 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3541 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3542 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3543 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3544 work around.
3545
3546- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3547 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3548 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3549 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3550 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3551 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3552 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3553 specified with O_CREAT too).
3554
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003555Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003556----
3557
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003558- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003559
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003560- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3561 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3562 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3563
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003564- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3565 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3566 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3567
3568- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3569 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3570 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3571 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3572 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3573 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3574 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3575 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003576
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003577- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3578 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3579 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003580
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003581- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3582 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3583 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3584 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3585 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003586
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003587- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3588 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3589 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003590
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003591- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3592 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003593
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003594- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3595 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3596 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3597 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3598 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003599
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003600- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3601 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3602 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3603
3604- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3605 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3606 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003607
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003608- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3609 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3610 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3611 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003612 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003613
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003614- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3615 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003616
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003617- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3618 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003619
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003620- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003621 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003622 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3623 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003624
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003625
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003626What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003627===============================
3628
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003629*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3630
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003631Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003632--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003633
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003634- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3635 with a custom metaclass.
3636
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003637Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003638-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003639
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003640- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3641 are proxies.
3642
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003643Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003644-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003645
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003646- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3647 very short strings.
3648
3649- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3650 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3651 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3652 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3653 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3654
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003655Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003656-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003657
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003658- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3659 close or delete time).
3660
3661- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3662 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3663
3664- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3665
3666- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003667 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003668
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003669Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003670-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003671
3672Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003673-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003674
3675C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003676-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003677
3678New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003679-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003680
3681Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003682-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003683
3684Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003685-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003686
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003687- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3688
3689- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3690 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3691
3692- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3693 deleted at process exit time.
3694
3695- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3696 in backslash.
3697
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003698Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003699----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003700
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003701- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3702 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3703 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3704
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003705
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003706What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003707===========================
3708
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003709*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3710
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003711Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003712--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003713
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003714- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3715 been extensively updated. See
3716
3717 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3718
3719 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3720
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003721- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3722 deleted!
3723
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003724- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3725 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3726 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3727 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3728 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3729
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003730- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3731
3732 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3733 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3734
3735 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3736 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3737 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3738 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3739 supported anyway.
3740
3741 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3742 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3743
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003744- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3745 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3746 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3747 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3748 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003749
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003750- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3751 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3752 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3753
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003754Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003755-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003756
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003757- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3758 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3759 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3760 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3761 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3762 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003763 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3764 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3765 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3766 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003767
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003768- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3769 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3770 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3771
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003772Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003773-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003774
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003775- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3776
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003777Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003778-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003779
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003780- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3781 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3782 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3783 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3784 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3785 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3786
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003787- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3788
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003789- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3790
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003791- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3792
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003793- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3794 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3795 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3796
3797- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3798
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003799Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003800-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003801
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003802- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3803 off a search on Google.
3804
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003805Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003806-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003807
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003808- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3809 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3810 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3811 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3812 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3813 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3814 other platforms should do likewise.
3815
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003816- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3817 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3818 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3819
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003820C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003821-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003822
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003823- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3824 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3825 producing key-value pairs.
3826
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003827- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003828 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003829 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3830 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3831 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3832 previously went unchallenged.
3833
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003834New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003835-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003836
3837Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003838-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003839
3840Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003841-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003842
3843Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003844----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003845
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003846- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3847 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003848
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003849- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3850 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3851 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3852 home.
3853
3854
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003855What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003856===========================
3857
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003858*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3859
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003860Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003861--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003862
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003863- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3864 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003865
3866 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003867 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003868
3869 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3870 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003871 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003872 This needs to be documented.
3873
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003874- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3875 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3876
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003877- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3878 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3879 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3880
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003881- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3882 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3883
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003884- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3885 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3886 class forbids it).
3887
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003888- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3889 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3890 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3891
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003892- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3893
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003894Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003895-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003896
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003897- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3898 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003899 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003900
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003901- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3902 (like 1 + '').
3903
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003904Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003905-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003906
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003907- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3908 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3909 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3910 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003911 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003912 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3913
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003914- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3915 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3916 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3917 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3918
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003919- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3920 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003921 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3922 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3923 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003924
3925- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3926 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003927
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003928- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3929 bytes on its input.
3930
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003931Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003932-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003933
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003934- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003935 convenience function.
3936
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003937- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3938 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3939 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003940 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3941 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3942 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3943 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3944 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3945 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003946
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003947- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3948 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3949 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3950 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3951
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003952- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3953 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3954 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3955
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003956- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3957 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3958 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3959 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3960
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003961- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3962 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003963 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003964 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3965 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3966 new -l and -e options.
3967
3968- statcache is now deprecated.
3969
3970- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3971 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003972 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003973 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3974 time properly taken into account.
3975
3976- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3977 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3978 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3979 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3980
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003981Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003982-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003983
3984Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003985-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003986
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003987- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3988 is built with libdb3 if available.
3989
3990- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3991
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003992C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003993-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003994
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003995- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3996 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3997 PySequence_Size().
3998
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003999- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4000
4001- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4002 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4003 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4004
4005- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4006 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4007
4008- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4009 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4010
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004011New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004012-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004013
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004014- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4015 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4016
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004017- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4018 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4019
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004020- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4021
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004022Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004023-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004024
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004025- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4026 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4027
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004028Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004029-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004030
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004031Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004032----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004033
4034- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4035 removed completely in the next release.
4036
4037- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4038 OSX.
4039
4040- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4041 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4042
4043- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4044
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004045
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004046What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004047===========================
4048
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004049*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4050
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004051Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004052--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004053
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004054- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004055 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004056 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004057 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4058 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004059 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4060 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004061 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4062 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004063
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004064- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4065 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4066
4067- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4068 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4069
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004070Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004071-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004072
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004073- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4074 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4075 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4076 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4077 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4078 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4079 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4080 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4081
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004082- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4083 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4084 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4085 example).
4086
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004087- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004088 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004089 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004090 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004091
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004092- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4093 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4094 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004095 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004096
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004097- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4098 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4099 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4100 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4101 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4102 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4103
4104 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4105
4106 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4107
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004108Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004109-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004110
4111- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4112
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004113- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4114
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004115- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4116 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004117
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004118- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4119 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4120 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4121 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4122 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4123 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004124 attributes.
4125
4126- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4127 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4128 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004129
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004130- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4131 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4132 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004133
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004134- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4135 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4136 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004137 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4138 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4139
4140- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4141 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004142
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004143Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004144-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004145
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004146- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4147 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4148
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004149- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4150 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4151 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4152 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4153
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004154- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4155 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4156 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4157 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4158
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004159 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4160 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4161 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4162 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4163 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4164 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4165 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4166 without losing information).
4167
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004168- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004169 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4170 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4171 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4172 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4173 module).
4174
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004175 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004176 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4177 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4178 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4179 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004180
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004181- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004182 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4183 encoding.
4184
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004185- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4186 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4187
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004188- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004189 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4190
4191- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4192 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4193 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4194 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4195
4196- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4197
4198- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4199 ON, and OFF.
4200
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004201- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4202 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4203
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004204Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004205-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004206
4207- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4208 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4209 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004210
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004211- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4212 been added: -X and -E.
4213
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004214Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004215-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004216
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004217- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4218 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4219
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004220C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004221-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004222
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004223- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4224 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4225 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4226 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4227 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4228
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004229- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4230 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4231 as long) arguments.
4232
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004233- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4234 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4235 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4236 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4237 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4238 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4239
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004240- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4241 input.
4242
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004243New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004244-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004245
4246Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004247-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004248
4249Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004250-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004251
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004252- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4253 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4254 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4255
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004256- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4257 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4258 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004259 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004260
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004261 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4262 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4263 import signal
4264 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004265
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004266 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004267 while 1:
4268 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004269 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004270 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4271 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4272 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4273 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004274
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004275
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004276What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4277===========================
4278
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4280
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004281Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004282--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004283
4284- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4285 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4286 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4287
4288- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4289 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4290 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4291 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4292 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4293 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4294 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004295
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004296- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004297 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004298 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4299 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4300 associate a docstring with a property.
4301
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004302- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4303 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4304 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4305 other built-in object types.
4306
4307- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4308 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4309 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4310 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4311 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4312
4313- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4314 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4315
4316- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4317 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004318 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004319 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4320 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4321 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4322 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4323 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4324
4325- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4326 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4327 class.
4328
4329- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4330 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4331 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4332 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4333
4334- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4335 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4336 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4337 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4338
4339- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4340 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4341
4342- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4343 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4344 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4345 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4346 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004347 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004348 with the same value as s.
4349
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004350- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4351
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004352Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004354
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004355- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4356
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004357- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4358 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4359 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4360 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4361 objects.
4362
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004363- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4364 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004365 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4366 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4367
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004368- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4369 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4370 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4371
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004372Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004373-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004374
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004375- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4376 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4377 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4378 by the instances.
4379
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004380- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4381 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4382 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4383
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004384- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4385 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4386 before the entire comparison is complete.
4387
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004388- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4389 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4390 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4391
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004392- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4393 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4394 getwriter().
4395
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004396- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4397 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4398
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004399- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004400 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4401 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4402
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004403- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4404 iterable object.
4405
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004406- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4407 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004408
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004409- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4410 authentication.
4411
4412- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4413 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004414
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004415- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004416 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4417 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4418 a sample driver.)
4419
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004420Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004421-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004422
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004423- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4424 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4425 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4426 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4427 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4428 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4429 kernel has large file support.
4430
4431- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4432 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4433 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4434 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4435 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4436
4437- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4438 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4439 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4440
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004441C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004443
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004444- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4445 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4446
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004447New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004449
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004450- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4451 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4452
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004453Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004454-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004455
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004456- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4457 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4458 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4459 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4460 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4461
4462- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4463 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4464 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4465 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4466
4467- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4468 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4469
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004470Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004471-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004472
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004473- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004474 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4475 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004476
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004477
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004478What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4479===========================
4480
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004481*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4482
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004483Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004484----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004485
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004486- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4487 big to represent as a C double.
4488
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004489- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4490 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4491 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4492 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4493 restriction).
4494
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004495- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4496 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4497 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4498 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4499 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4500
4501 >>> dir([])
4502 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4503 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4504 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4505 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4506 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4507 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4508 'reverse', 'sort']
4509
4510 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4511
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004512- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004513 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4514 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4515 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4516 OverflowError exception.
4517
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004518- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004519 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004520 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4521 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4522 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4523 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4524 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004525 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004526 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4527 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4528
4529 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4530 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4531 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4532 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004533
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004534- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004535 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4536 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4537 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4538 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4539 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4540 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4541 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4542 once it is created.
4543
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004544- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4545 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4546 (key, value) pairs.
4547
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004548- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004549 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4550 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4551
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004552- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4553 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4554 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4555 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4556 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004557
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004558- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004559 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4560 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4561
4562 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4563
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004564- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004565 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4566
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004567Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004568-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004569
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004570- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004571 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4572 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004573
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004574- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4575 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4576 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4577 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4578 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4579 in this area anymore).
4580
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004581- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4582 threading.Timer.
4583
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004584- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4585 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4586
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004587- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004588 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4589
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004590- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004591 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4592 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4593 converted to Python longs.
4594
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004595- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004596 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4597
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004598- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4599 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4600 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4601
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004602Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004603-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004604
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004605- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4606 division operators as per PEP 238.
4607
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004608Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004609-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004610
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004611- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4612 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4613 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4614 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4615
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004616C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004617-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004618
4619- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004620
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004621- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4622 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004623 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004624
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004625 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4626 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004627 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004628 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004629
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004630- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004631 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4632 module:
4633
4634 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004635
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004636 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4637 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004638
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004639 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4640 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004641
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004642 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4643
4644 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4645
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004646- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004647 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4648 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4649 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004650
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004651New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004652-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004653
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004654- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4655 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4656 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4657 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4658 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004659
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004660Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004661-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004662
4663Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004664-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004665
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004666- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4667 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4668 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4669 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004670 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4671 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4672 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4673 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4674 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004675
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004676- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004677 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4678
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004679
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004680What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4681===========================
4682
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004683*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4684
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004685Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004686-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004687
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004688- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4689 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4690
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004691- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4692 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4693 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004694
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004695- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4696 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4697 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4698 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004699
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004700- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4701
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004702- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004703
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004704Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004705-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004706
4707- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004708 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004709 the module docstring for details.
4710
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004711Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004712-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004713
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004714- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004715 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4716 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4717 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004718
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004719- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4720 Nick Mathewson.
4721
4722Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004724
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004725- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4726 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4727 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4728 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4729 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4730 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4731 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4732 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4733
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004734- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4735 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4736 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4737 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4738
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004739- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4740 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4741 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4742 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4743 come a long way).
4744
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004745- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4746 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4747 write filters for these warnings).
4748
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004749- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4750 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4751 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4752 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4753 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4754
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004755- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4756 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4757 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4758 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4759 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4760 older distribution.
4761
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004762Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004763-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004764
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004765- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4766 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004767 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004768
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004769- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4770 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4771 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4772
4773- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4774
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004775- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4776
4777- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4778
4779- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4780
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004781- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004782
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004783- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4784
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004785New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004786-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004787
4788C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004789-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004790
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004791- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4792 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4793 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4794 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4795 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4796 against buffer overruns.
4797
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004798- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004799 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4800 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004801 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4802 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4803 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4804
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004805- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4806 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4807 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4808 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4809 deprecated.
4810
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004811Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004812-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004813
4814- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4815 relevant is found.
4816
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004817
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004818What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004819===========================
4820
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004821*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4822
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004823Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004824----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004825
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004826- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4827 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4828 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4829 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4830 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4831 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4832 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4833 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004834 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004835 repaired.
4836
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004837- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004838 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004839 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4840 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4841 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4842 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4843 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4844 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4845 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4846 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4847
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004848- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4849 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4850 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4851 leading BMO character).
4852
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004853- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4854 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4855 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4856
4857 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4858 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4859 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004860
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004861 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4862 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4863 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4864 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4865 for various simple to use conversions.
4866
4867 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4868 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4869
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004870 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4871 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4872 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4873 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4874 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4875 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4876 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4877 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4878 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4879 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4880 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4881 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4882 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4883 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4884 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004885
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004886- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4887 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4888 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004889 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004890 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004891
4892 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004893 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4894 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4895 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4896 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4897 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004898 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4899 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004900
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004901 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4902 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4903 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004904 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004905
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004906- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4907 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4908 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4909 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4910 floating arithmetic,
4911
4912 x = 9007199254740992.0
4913 print long(x)
4914
4915 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4916 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4917 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4918 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4919 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4920 functions are of good quality).
4921
4922 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4923 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4924 algorithms to break.
4925
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004926- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4927 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4928 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4929 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4930 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4931 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4932 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4933 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4934 order.
4935
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004936- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4937 operation along the most common code paths.
4938
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004939- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4940 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4941
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004942- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4943 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4944 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4945 {}.update(UserDict())
4946
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004947- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4948 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4949 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4950 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4951 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4952 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4953 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4954 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4955
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004956- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004957 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004958
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004959 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004960 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4961 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004962 join() method of strings
4963 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004964 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4965 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004966 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004967 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004968
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004969- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4970 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4971
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004972- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4973 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4974
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004975- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4976 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4977 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4978 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4979
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004980- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4981 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004982 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004983 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4984 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004985
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004986- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4987
4988
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004989Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004990-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004991
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004992- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004993 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004994 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4995 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4996
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004997- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4998 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4999
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005000- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5001 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5002 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5003 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5004
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005005- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5006 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5007 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5008
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005009- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5010
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005011- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5012
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005013- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5014 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5015 that are still imported into string.py).
5016
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005017- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5018
5019- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5020 Now it does.
5021
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005022- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5023
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005024- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5025 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5026 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5027 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5028 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005029 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5030 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005031
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005032- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5033 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5034 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5035 'help(object)'.
5036
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005037Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005038-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005039
5040- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005041 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005042 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5043 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5044
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005045- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005046 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5047 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005048
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005049C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005050-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005051
5052- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5053 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005054
5055----
5056
5057**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**