blob: f168fa1ab145a7a44ab3c5f1cf52b737d52ca689 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000015- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
16
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000017- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
18 reference counts in some error exit cases.
19
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000020- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
21 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
22 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
23 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
24 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
25 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
26 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
27 realloc.
28
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000029- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
30 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
31
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000032- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
33 like their int counterparts.
34
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000035- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
36 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
37 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
38 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
39 for a longer write-up of the problem).
40
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000041- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
42 serializing floats.
43
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000044- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
45 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
46 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
47
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000048- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
49 278.
50
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000051- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
52 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
53 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
54 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
55 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
56 PyNumber_*().
57 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
58
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000059- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
60 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
61 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
62 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
63
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000064- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
65 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
66 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
67 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
68 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
69
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000070- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
71 disabled caused a crash.
72
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000073- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
74 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
75
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000076- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000077 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
78
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000079- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
80
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000081- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000082 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
83 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
84 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000085
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000086- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
87
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000088- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
89 returning None.
90
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000091- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000092 ('\') with a specific error message.
93
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000094- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
95
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000096- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
97 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
98
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000099- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000100 an ferror() call.
101
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000102- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
103 list.sort().
104
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000105- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
106 (2+3) --> (5).
107
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000108- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
109
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000110- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
111 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000112
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000113- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
114 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
115 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
116
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000117Extension Modules
118-----------------
119
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000120- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000121 implemented treated all integer values except 1 as false.
122
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000123- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
124
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000125- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
126 if available on the platform.
127
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000128- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
129 available on the platform.
130
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000131- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
132 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
133
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000134- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
135
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000136- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
137 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
138 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
139
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000140- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
141
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000142- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
143 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
144
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000145- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000146 file size.
147
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000148- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
149
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000150- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
151 {remove_history,replace_history}
152
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000153- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
154 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000155
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000156- stat_float_times is now True.
157
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000158- array.array objects are now picklable.
159
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000160- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
161 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
162
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000163- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
164 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
165 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
166
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000167- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
168 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000169
170Library
171-------
172
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000173- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
174 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
175 Tkdnd.
176
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000177- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
178 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
179
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000180- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
181 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
182
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000183- textwrap now processes text chucks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
184 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
185
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000186- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
187 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
188
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000189- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
190 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
191
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000192- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
193 though this can be missing in embedded interpreters
194
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000195- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
196
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000197- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
198 error messages.
199
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000200- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
201
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000202- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
203 Bug #1224621.
204
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000205- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
206 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
207 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
208 terminates by raising StopIteration.
209
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000210- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
211
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000212- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
213 component of the path.
214
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000215- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
216 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
217 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
218 class at all.
219
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000220- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
221 files to PyPI.
222
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000223- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
224 them to PyPI.
225
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000226- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
227 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
228 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
229 work as expected.
230
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000231- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
232 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
233
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000234- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000235 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
236
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000237- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
238
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000239- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
240 to build.
241
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000242- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
243 symbolic links on Windows.
244
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000245- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000246 profile.py if available.
247
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000248- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
249
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000250- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
251 in LWPCookieJar.
252
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000253- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
254
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000255- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
256
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000257- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
258
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000259- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
260
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000261- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
262
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000263- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
264
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000265- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
266
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000267- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
268
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000269- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
270 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
271 be exploited in various ways.
272
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000273- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
274
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000275- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
276
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000277- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
278
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000279- Enhancements to the csv module:
280
281 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000282 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000283 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000284 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
285 reporting.
286 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
287 dictates.
288 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000289 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000290 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000291 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
292 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000293 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
294 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000295 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000296 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
297 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
298 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
299 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
300 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
301 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
302 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
303 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
304 without first creating a dialect class.
305 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
306 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
307 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000308 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000309 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
310 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000311 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
312 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
313 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
314 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000315 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
316 This has been fixed.
317
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000318- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
319 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
320 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
321 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
322
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000323- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
324
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000325- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
326 (Bug #951915).
327
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000328- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
329 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
330 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
331 encoding alias table
332
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000333- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
334
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000335- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
336 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
337
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000338- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
339
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000340- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
341
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000342- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
343
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000344- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
345
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000346- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
347
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000348- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
349 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
350 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
351
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000352- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000353 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000354
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000355- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
356 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
357 tokenizer with very long source lines.
358
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000359- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
360 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
361
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000362- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
363 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000364
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000365- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
366 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
367
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000368- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
369 correctly.
370
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000371- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
372 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
373 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
374 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
375 between two lines.
376
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000377
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000378Build
379-----
380
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000381- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
382 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
383
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000384- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
385 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
386 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000387 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000388
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000389- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
390 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
391 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
392
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000393- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
394
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000395- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
396 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
397
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000398- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
399 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
400 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
401 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
402 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
403 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
404 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
405 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
406
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000407- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
408 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
409 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
410 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
411
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000412
413C API
414-----
415
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000416- Removed PyRange_New().
417
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000418
419Tests
420-----
421
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000422- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000423
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000424
425Documentation
426-------------
427
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000428- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
429
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000430- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
431
432- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
433
434- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
435
436- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
437
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000438- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
439 Closes bug #1166582.
440
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000441- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
442 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
443 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
444
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000445Mac
446---
447
448
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000449New platforms
450-------------
451
452- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
453
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000454
455Tools/Demos
456-----------
457
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000458- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
459
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000460- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000461
462
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000463What's New in Python 2.4 final?
464===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000465
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000466*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000467
468Core and builtins
469-----------------
470
471- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
472 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
473 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
474
475
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000476What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
477==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000478
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000479*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000480
481Core and builtins
482-----------------
483
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000484- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
485 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
486 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
487
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000488
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000489Library
490-------
491
492- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
493 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
494 raised is re-raised.
495
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000496- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
497 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
498
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000499- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
500 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
501 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
502 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
503 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
504 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
505 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
506 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
507 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
508 by the slice are recomputed now.
509
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000510- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000511
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000512Build
513-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000514
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000515- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
516 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
517 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000518
519C API
520-----
521
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000522- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
523
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000524
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000525What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
526================================
527
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000528*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000529
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000530License
531-------
532
533The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
534is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
535changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
536Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
537intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
538durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
539the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
540License::
541
542 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
543
544says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
545to Python 2.1.1.
546
547The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
548License Version 2.
549
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000550Core and builtins
551-----------------
552
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000553- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
554 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
555 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
556 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
557 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
558 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
559 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
560 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
561 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
562 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
563
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000564- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000565
566Extension Modules
567-----------------
568
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000569- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
570 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
571 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
572 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000573
574Library
575-------
576
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000577- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
578 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
579 returned.
580
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000581- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
582
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000583- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
584 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
585
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000586- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
587
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000588- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
589 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000590
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000591- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
592
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000593- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
594
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000595- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000596 the source code is updated and reloaded.
597
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000598Build
599-----
600
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000601- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000602
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000603What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
604================================
605
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000606*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000607
608Core and builtins
609-----------------
610
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000611- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000612 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
613
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000614- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
615 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
616 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
617 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
618
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000619- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
620 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
621
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000622- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
623 constant.
624
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000625- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
626 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
627 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
628 large), and to anomalies such as
629 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
630 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
631 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
632 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000633
634Extension modules
635-----------------
636
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000637- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
638 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000639 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
640 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
641 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000642
643Library
644-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000645
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000646- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000647 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000648 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
649 --swig-cpp.
650
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000651- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
652 it is set.
653
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000654- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000655
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000656- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
657 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
658 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
659 Closes bug #1039270.
660
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000661- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000662
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000663 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000664 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
665 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
666 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
667 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
668 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
669 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
670 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
671 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
672 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
673 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
674 + Updates to documentation.
675
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000676- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
677 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
678 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
679 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
680
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000681- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000682
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000683- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
684 applications should use the getmember function.
685
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000686- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
687
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000688- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
689 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
690 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
691 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
692 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
693 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
694 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
695 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
696 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
697
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000698- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
699 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000700 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000701
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000702- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
703 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
704 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
705 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
706 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
707 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
708 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
709 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000710
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000711- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
712 the new public features (of which there are many).
713
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000714- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000715 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
716 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
717 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
718 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000719 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000720
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000721- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
722
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000723- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
724 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
725 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
726 options.
727
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000728- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
729 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
730 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
731 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
732 conditions under which non-string values work.
733
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000734Build
735-----
736
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000737- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
738 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
739 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
740
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000741- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
742 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
743 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
744 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
745 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000746
747C API
748-----
749
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000750- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
751 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
752
753- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
754
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000755- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
756 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
757 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
758 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
759 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
760 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
761 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
762 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
763 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
764
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000765- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
766
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000767- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
768 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
769 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000770
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000771Tests
772-----
773
774- test__locale ported to unittest
775
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000776Mac
777---
778
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000779- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
780 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
781 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000782
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000783Tools/Demos
784-----------
785
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000786- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
787 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
788 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
789 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
790 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000791
792
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000793What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
794=================================
795
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000796*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000797
798Core and builtins
799-----------------
800
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000801- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000802 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
803
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000804- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
805 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
806 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
807 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
808 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
809 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
810 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
811 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000812 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
813 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
814 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
815 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
816 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000817
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000818- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
819 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
820 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
821 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
822 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
823
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000824- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
825
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000826- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
827 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
828
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000829- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
830 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
831 modified the list.
832
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000833- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
834 functions is now writable.
835
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000836- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
837 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
838 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
839 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
840
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000841- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
842 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
843 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
844 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
845 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000846
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000847- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
848 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
849
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000850Extension modules
851-----------------
852
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000853- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
854
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000855- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
856 data.
857
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000858- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
859 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
860 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
861 supposed to have been truncated away.
862
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000863- Added socket.socketpair().
864
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000865- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
866 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
867
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000868- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000869 versions of Python, have now been removed.
870
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000871Library
872-------
873
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000874- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000875 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000876
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000877- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
878 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
879
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000880- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
881 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
882
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000883- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
884
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000885- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
886 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000887
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000888- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
889 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
890
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000891- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
892
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000893- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
894
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000895- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
896
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000897- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
898 Percivall.
899
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000900- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
901 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
902
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000903- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
904 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
905 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000906 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000907
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000908- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
909 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
910 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
911 and exponent.
912
913- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
914
915- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +0000916 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000917 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
918
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000919- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
920 to the readline module.
921
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000922- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000923 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
924 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000925
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000926- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
927 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
928 contains symlinks.
929
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000930- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
931 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
932
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000933- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
934 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
935 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
936
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000937- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
938 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
939 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
940 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
941 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
942 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
943 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
944 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
945 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
946 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
947 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
948 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
949 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
950
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000951- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
952
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000953Tools/Demos
954-----------
955
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000956- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
957 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
958
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000959- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
960
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000961Build
962-----
963
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000964- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
965 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
966 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
967 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
968 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
969 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
970 plans to do so.
971
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000972- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
973 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
974
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000975- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
976 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
977
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000978- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
979 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
980
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000981- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
982 GNU/k*BSD systems.
983
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000984- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
985 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
986
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000987C API
988-----
989
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000990..
991
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000992Documentation
993-------------
994
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000995- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
996 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
997
998- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
999 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1000 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001001
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001002New platforms
1003-------------
1004
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001005- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1006
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001007Tests
1008-----
1009
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001010..
1011
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001012Windows
1013-------
1014
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001015- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1016 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1017 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1018 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1019 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1020 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1021 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1022 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1023 the problem.
1024
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001025Mac
1026---
1027
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001028..
1029
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001030
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001031What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1032=================================
1033
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001034*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001035
1036Core and builtins
1037-----------------
1038
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001039- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1040 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1041 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1042 sensitive code.
1043
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001044- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001045 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001046
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001047 @staticmethod
1048 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001049
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001050 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001051
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001052- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1053 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1054 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1055 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1056 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1057 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1058 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1059 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1060 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1061 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1062 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1063
1064 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1065 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1066 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1067 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1068 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1069 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1070 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1071
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001072- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1073 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1074
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001075- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001076 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001077
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001078- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001079 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001080 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1081
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001082- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001083 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1084 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1085
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001086- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1087 types that support garbage collection.
1088
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001089- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1090
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001091- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1092 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1093 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1094 Jython.
1095
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001096- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1097
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001098- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1099 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1100
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001101- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1102 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1103 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001104
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001105- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1106 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1107 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1108
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001109Extension modules
1110-----------------
1111
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001112- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1113
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001114Library
1115-------
1116
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001117- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1118 TIS-620
1119
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001120- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1121 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1122 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1123 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1124 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1125 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1126 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1127 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1128 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1129 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1130
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001131- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1132
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001133- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1134 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1135 same as when the argument is omitted).
1136 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1137
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001138- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1139
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001140- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1141 schemes are offered.
1142
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001143- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1144
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001145- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1146 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1147 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1148
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001149- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1150
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001151- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1152 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1153
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001154- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1155 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1156 when dummy_threading is being used.
1157
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001158- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1159 from a tarfile.
1160
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001161- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001162 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001163
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001164- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1165 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1166 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1167 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1168
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001169- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1170 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1171
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001172- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1173 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1174 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1175 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1176 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1177 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1178 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1179 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1180 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1181 by some other method in progress).
1182
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001183- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1184 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1185 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001186
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001187- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1188
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001189- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1190 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1191 AM Kuchling.
1192
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001193- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1194 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1195 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1196
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001197- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1198 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1199 instead of unsigned.
1200
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001201- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001202 no longer part of the public API.
1203
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001204- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1205 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1206 string methods of the same name).
1207
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001208- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001209 SF patch 945642.
1210
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001211- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1212
1213 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1214
1215 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1216 DocTestSuites.
1217
1218- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1219 that provide thread-local data.
1220
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001221- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1222 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1223
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001224- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1225
1226- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1227 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1228 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1229
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001230- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1231
1232 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1233 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1234 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001235
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001236 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1237 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1238 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1239 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1240
1241 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1242 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1243
1244 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1245 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1246 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1247 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1248
1249 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1250 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1251 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1252 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1253 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1254
1255 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1256 wrapping help output.
1257
1258 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1259 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1260 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001261
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001262C API
1263-----
1264
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001265- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1266 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1267 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1268 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1269 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1270 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1271 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1272 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1273 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1274 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1275 its visible semantics have not changed.
1276
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001277- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1278 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1279
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001280Documentation
1281-------------
1282
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001283- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001284
1285 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001286 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001287
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001288 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001289
1290 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1291
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001292- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001293
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001294Tests
1295-----
1296
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001297- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001298 platforms that use the Makefile.
1299
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001300- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1301 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1302 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1303
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001304
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001305What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1306=================================
1307
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001308*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001309
1310Core and builtins
1311-----------------
1312
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001313- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1314 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1315 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1316 objects now (one object instead of three).
1317
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001318- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1319 Windows DLLs.
1320
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001321- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1322 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001323
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001324- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1325 a new .pyc magic.
1326
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001327- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1328 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1329 be there.
1330
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001331- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1332 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1333 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1334
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001335- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1336 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1337 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1338
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001339- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1340
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001341- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1342 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1343 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001344
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001345- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1346 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1347
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001348- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1349
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001350- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001351 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001352
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001353- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1354
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001355- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1356
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001357- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1358 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1359
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001360- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1361 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1362 Fixes bug #858016 .
1363
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001364- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1365 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1366 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1367
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001368- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1369 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1370 improves their performance (about 35%).
1371
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001372- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1373 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1374 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1375
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001376- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1377 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1378 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1379 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1380
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001381- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1382 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001383 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001384 length is not known).
1385
1386- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1387 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001388 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1389 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001390 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1391
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001392- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1393 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1394
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001395- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1396 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1397 keyword arguments.
1398
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001399- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1400 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1401 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1402
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001403- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1404 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1405 cases.
1406
1407- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1408 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1409 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1410 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1411 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1412 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1413 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1414 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1415 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1416 a release build.
1417
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001418- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1419 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1420
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001421- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001422 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001423
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001424- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1425 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1426 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1427 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1428 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1429 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1430 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1431 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1432 destroyed.
1433
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001434- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1435 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1436 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1437 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1438 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1439 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1440 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1441 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1442
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001443- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1444 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1445 character other than a space.
1446
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001447- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1448 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1449 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1450 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1451 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1452 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1453 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1454 attributes with the same name.
1455
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001456- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1457 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1458 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1459 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1460 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1461 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1462 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1463 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1464 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1465 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1466 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1467 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1468 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1469 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001470
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001471- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1472 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1473 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1474 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1475 This has been repaired.
1476
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001477- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1478
1479- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1480
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001481- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1482 over a sequence.
1483
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001484- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001485 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001486
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001487- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1488
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001489- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1490 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1491 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1492 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1493 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1494 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1495 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1496 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1497
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001498- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1499 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1500 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1501
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001502- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1503 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1504 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1505 freelist.
1506
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001507- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1508 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1509
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001510- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1511 number.
1512
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001513- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1514 a TypeError exception.
1515
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001516- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1517 820195.
1518
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001519- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1520 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1521 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1522
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001523- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001524 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1525 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001526
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001527- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1528 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1529 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1530
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001531- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1532 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001533 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001534
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001535- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001536 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1537 the first call.
1538
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001539
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001540Extension modules
1541-----------------
1542
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001543- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1544 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1545
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001546- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1547 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1548 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1549 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1550 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1551 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1552 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001553
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001554- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1555
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001556- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1557
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001558- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1559 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1560
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001561- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1562 fewer false positives.
1563
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001564- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1565 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1566
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001567- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001568 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1569
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001570- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001571 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001572 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001573 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1574 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001575
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001576- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1577 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1578 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1579 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1580
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001581- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1582 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1583 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1584 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1585 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1586 #897625.
1587
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001588- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1589 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1590
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001591- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1592 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1593 and pops on either side of the deque.
1594
1595- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1596 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1597
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001598- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1599 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1600 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1601 other functions that expect a function argument.
1602
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001603- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1604
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001605- os.getsid was added.
1606
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001607- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1608 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1609 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1610
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001611- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1612
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001613- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1614
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001615- readline.clear_history was added.
1616
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001617- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1618
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001619- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1620
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001621- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1622
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001623- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1624
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001625- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1626
1627- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1628
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001629- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1630
1631- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1632
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001633- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1634 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1635 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1636
1637- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1638 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1639 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1640 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1641 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1642 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1643 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1644
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001645- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1646 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1647 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1648 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001649
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001650- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001651 iterators from a single iterable.
1652
1653- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1654 of raising a TypeError exception.
1655
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001656- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1657 as parameter.
1658
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001659Library
1660-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001661
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001662- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1663 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1664 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001665
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001666- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1667 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1668 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001669
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001670- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001671
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001672- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1673 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001674
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001675- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1676 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1677
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001678- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1679
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001680- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001681 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001682
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001683- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001684 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001685
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001686- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1687
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001688- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1689 on cygwin and mingw32.
1690
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001691- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1692
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001693- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1694 module.
1695
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001696- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1697 installation scheme for all platforms.
1698
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001699- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001700 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001701
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001702- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1703 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1704 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1705
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001706- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1707 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1708 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1709
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001710- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1711
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001712- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1713
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001714- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1715 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1716
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001717- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1718 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1719 type pattern with the same value exists.
1720
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001721- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1722 when run from the command prompt).
1723
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001724- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1725 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1726
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001727- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1728 default sort).
1729
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001730- Added global runctx function to profile module
1731
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001732- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1733
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001734- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1735
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001736- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1737
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001738- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001739 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1740 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1741 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1742 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1743 accordingly.
1744
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001745- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1746 decoding standards.
1747
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001748- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1749 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1750 called for all requests.
1751
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001752- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1753 they are passed to the compiler.
1754
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001755- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1756 indent, width and depth.
1757
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001758- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1759 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1760
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001761- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1762 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1763
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001764- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1765
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001766- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1767
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001768- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1769
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001770- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1771 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1772
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001773- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001774 for better performance.
1775
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001776- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001777
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001778- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1779 a string).
1780
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001781- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1782
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001783- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1784
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001785- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1786
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001787- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1788
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001789- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1790 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1791 list of fieldnames.
1792
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001793- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1794 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1795
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001796- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1797
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001798- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1799 empty lists.
1800
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001801- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1802 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1803 and shelves.
1804
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001805- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1806 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1807
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001808- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001809 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1810 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001811
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001812- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1813 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001814 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001815
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001816- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001817 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1818 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1819
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001820- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1821 and removed in Py2.4.
1822
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001823- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1824
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001825- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1826
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001827Tools/Demos
1828-----------
1829
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001830- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1831 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1832
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001833- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1834
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001835- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1836 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1837 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1838 destination in situations where both files are given.
1839
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001840- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1841 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1842 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1843 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1844
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001845- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1846
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001847- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1848 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1849 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1850 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1851 now.
1852
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001853- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1854 in effect
1855
1856- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1857 C-c C-h
1858
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001859- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1860 -d option was given.
1861
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001862Build
1863-----
1864
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001865- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1866 build under OS X.
1867
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001868- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1869 --enable-profiling.
1870
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001871- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1872 is configured --with-tsc.
1873
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001874- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1875 on AMD64.
1876
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001877- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1878 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1879
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001880- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1881 removed.
1882
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001883- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1884 supported (see PEP 11).
1885
1886- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1887
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001888- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1889
1890- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1891 (see PEP 11).
1892
1893- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1894 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1895
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001896C API
1897-----
1898
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001899- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1900 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1901 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1902
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001903- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1904 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1905 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1906 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1907
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001908- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1909 generator objects.
1910
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001911- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1912 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001913 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1914 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001915
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001916- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1917 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1918
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001919- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1920 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1921 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1922 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1923 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1924
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001925- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1926 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1927 about 10% faster.
1928
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001929- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1930 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1931
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001932- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1933 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1934 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1935 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1936
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001937Windows
1938-------
1939
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001940- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1941 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1942 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1943 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1944
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001945- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1946 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1947 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1948
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001949
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001950What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1951===============================
1952
1953*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1954
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001955IDLE
1956----
1957
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001958- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1959 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1960 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1961 context-menu actions.
1962
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001963- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1964 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1965 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1966 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1967 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1968 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1969 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1970 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1971 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1972
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001973
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001974What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1975=============================================
1976
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001977*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001978
1979Core and builtins
1980-----------------
1981
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001982- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001983 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001984 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1985
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001986Extension modules
1987-----------------
1988
1989- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1990 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1991 than once. This has been fixed.
1992
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001993- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1994 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1995 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1996 call.
1997
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001998- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1999
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002000Library
2001-------
2002
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002003- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2004 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2005
2006- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2007 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2008 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2009 restored.
2010
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002011IDLE
2012----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002013
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002014- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002015
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002016Build
2017-----
2018
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002019- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2020 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2021
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002022C API
2023-----
2024
2025Windows
2026-------
2027
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002028- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2029 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2030
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002031- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2032
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002033Mac
2034---
2035
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002036- Various fixes to pimp.
2037
2038- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2039
2040- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2041 more problems than it solves.
2042
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002043
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002044What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2045=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002046
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002047*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2048
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002049Core and builtins
2050-----------------
2051
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002052- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2053 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2054
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002055- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2056 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002057 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002058
2059- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2060 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2061 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002062 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002063
2064- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2065 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002066
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002067- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2068 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2069 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2070
2071- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002072 770247.
2073
2074- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002075
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002076Extension modules
2077-----------------
2078
2079- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2080 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2081
2082- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2083
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002084- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2085
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002086- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2087 contained within the _strptime module.
2088
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002089- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2090 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2091
2092- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002093 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2094
2095- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2096 the find_class attribute, if present.
2097
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002098- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002099
2100 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2101 (SF bug 763298).
2102
2103 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002104 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2105 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2106 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002107
2108 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2109
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002110Library
2111-------
2112
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002113- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2114
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002115- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2116 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2117 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2118 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2119 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2120 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2121 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2122 or Tester().
2123
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002124- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2125 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2126 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2127 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2128 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2129 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2130 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2131 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2132 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002133
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002134 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002135
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002136- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2137 weren't before was an oversight.
2138
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002139- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2140 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2141
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002142- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2143 when there are no lines.
2144
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002145- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2146 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2147
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002148- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2149 to child processes.
2150
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002151- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2152
2153- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2154
2155- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2156 xmlrpclib.
2157
2158- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2159 responses.
2160
2161- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2162 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2163
2164- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2165 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2166 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2167
2168- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2169 used as patterns.
2170
2171- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2172 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2173 than Tk 8.3.
2174
2175- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2176
2177- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002178
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002179Tools/Demos
2180-----------
2181
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002182- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2183
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002184- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2185
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002186- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002187
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002188Build
2189-----
2190
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002191- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2192
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002193- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2194
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002195- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2196 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002197
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002198- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2199 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2200 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002201
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002202C API
2203-----
2204
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002205- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2206 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2207
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002208Windows
2209-------
2210
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002211- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2212 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2213 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2214 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2215 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2216 Python exception ::
2217
2218 thread.error: can't start new thread
2219
2220 is raised now.
2221
2222- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2223 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2224 instead of from DLL teardown.
2225
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002226Mac
2227---
2228
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002229- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002230 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002231 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2232 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2233 the executable in the bundle.
2234
2235- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002236
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002237- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2238
2239- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2240 on Panther.
2241
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002242What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2243================================
2244
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002245*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002246
2247Core and builtins
2248-----------------
2249
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002250- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2251 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2252 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2253 with the -i option.
2254
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002255- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2256 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2257
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002258- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2259 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2260
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002261- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2262 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2263 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2264 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2265 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2266 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2267 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2268 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2269 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2270 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2271 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2272 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2273 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002274
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002275- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2276 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2277 embedded in a lambda expression.
2278
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002279- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2280 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2281 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2282 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2283 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2284
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002285- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2286 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2287 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2288
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002289- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2290 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2291
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002292- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2293 It's writable again.
2294
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002295- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2296 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2297 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002298 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002299
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002300- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2301 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2302 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2303
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002304Extension modules
2305-----------------
2306
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002307- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2308 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2309
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002310- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2311 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2312 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2313 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2314
2315- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2316 collection.
2317
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002318- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2319 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2320 unique within a single program run.
2321
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002322- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2323 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2324
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002325- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2326 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2327
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002328- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2329 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002330
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002331- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2332
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002333- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2334 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2335
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002336- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2337 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2338 for many BSD-derived systems.
2339
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002340
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002341Library
2342-------
2343
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002344- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2345 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2346 primary ones:
2347
2348 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2349 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2350 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2351
2352 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2353 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2354 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2355 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2356 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2357 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2358
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002359- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2360 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2361 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2362 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2363 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2364 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2365 argument.
2366
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002367- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2368 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2369 in the archive.
2370
2371- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2372 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2373
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002374- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2375 569574).
2376
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002377- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2378 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2379 no more.
2380
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002381- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2382 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2383 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2384 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2385 code coverage.
2386
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002387- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2388 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2389 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002390 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2391 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002392
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002393- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2394 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2395 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002396 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002397
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002398- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2399
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002400- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2401 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2402 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2403 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2404
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002405- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2406 handling.
2407
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002408- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2409 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2410
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002411- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2412 in socket.py.
2413
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002414- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2415
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002416- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2417 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2418 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2419 opener with proxy support.
2420
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002421- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2422
2423- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2424
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002425Tools/Demos
2426-----------
2427
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002428- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2429
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002430- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2431
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002432- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2433 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002434
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002435- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2436 files.
2437
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002438Build
2439-----
2440
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002441- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002442 different root directory.
2443
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002444C API
2445-----
2446
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002447- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2448 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2449 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2450 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2451 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2452 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2453 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2454 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2455 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2456 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2457
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002458- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2459 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2460 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2461 from Python.
2462
2463
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002464New platforms
2465-------------
2466
2467None this time.
2468
2469Tests
2470-----
2471
2472- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2473 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2474
2475Windows
2476-------
2477
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002478- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2479
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002480- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2481 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2482 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2483 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2484 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2485 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2486 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2487 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2488 that's what it's for.
2489
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002490Mac
2491---
2492
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002493- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2494 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2495 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2496 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002497- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2498 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2499- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002500
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002501SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2502------------------------------------
2503
2504430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2505598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2506622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2507661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2508683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2509697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2510713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2511724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2512727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2513729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2514730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2515731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2516732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2517733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2518735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2519740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2520744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2521745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2522747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2523749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2524751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2525753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2526755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2527757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2528760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2529
2530
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002531What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2532================================
2533
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002534*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002535
2536Core and builtins
2537-----------------
2538
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002539- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2540 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2541
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002542- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2543 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2544 and cannot be strings).
2545
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002546- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2547 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2548 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2549 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2550
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002551- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2552 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2553 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2554 Python itself.
2555
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002556- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2557 the referenced object, if it has one.
2558
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002559- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2560 the thread started at
2561 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2562
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002563- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2564 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2565 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2566 placed on a list index.
2567
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002568- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2569 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2570 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2571 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2572
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002573- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2574 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2575 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2576 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2577 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2578 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2579 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2580
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002581- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2582 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2583 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2584 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2585 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2586
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002587- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2588 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002589
2590- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2591 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2592 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2593 #693195.)
2594
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002595- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2596 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002597
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002598- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002599 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002600 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2601 interpreter executions, would fail.
2602
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002603- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002604 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002605 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002606
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002607Extension modules
2608-----------------
2609
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002610- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2611 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2612 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2613 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2614
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002615- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2616 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2617
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002618- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2619 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2620 and Greg Chapman.)
2621
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002622- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2623 recursively.
2624
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002625- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002626 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2627 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2628 leaks.
2629
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002630- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2631
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002632- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2633 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2634 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2635 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2636 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2637 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2638 #705836.
2639
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002640- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002641 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2642
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002643- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2644 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2645 See SF bug #692416.
2646
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002647- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2648 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2649
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002650- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2651 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2652 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002653
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002654- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002655 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2656 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2657
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002658- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2659 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2660 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2661 timeouts to work properly.
2662
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002663Library
2664-------
2665
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002666- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2667 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2668 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2669 future release.
2670
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002671- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2672 for querying platform dependent features.
2673
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002674- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002675
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002676- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2677 pickle protocol versions.
2678
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002679- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2680 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2681 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2682
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002683- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2684
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002685- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2686 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2687 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2688 modules.
2689
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002690- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2691 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2692 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2693
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002694- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2695 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2696
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002697- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2698 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2699 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2700
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002701- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002702 MS Office extensions.
2703
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002704- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2705 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2706
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002707- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2708 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2709
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002710- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2711 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2712 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2713 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2714 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2715 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2716
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002717- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2718 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2719 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002720
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002721- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2722 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2723 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2724
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002725- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2726
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002727- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2728 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2729 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2730
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002731Tools/Demos
2732-----------
2733
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002734- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2735 See the module docstring for details.
2736
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002737Build
2738-----
2739
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002740- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2741 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002742
2743C API
2744-----
2745
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002746- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2747
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002748- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2749 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2750 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2751
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002752- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2753 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002754
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002755 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2756 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2757 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002758
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002759- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002760 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2761
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002762- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2763 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2764 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002765
2766New platforms
2767-------------
2768
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002769None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002770
2771Tests
2772-----
2773
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002774- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2775 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002776
2777Windows
2778-------
2779
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002780- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2781 function.
2782
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002783- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2784 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002785
2786Mac
2787---
2788
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002789- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2790 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002791
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002792- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2793 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002794
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002795- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2796 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2797 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002798
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002799- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002800 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2801 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002802
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002803- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2804 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002805
2806
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002807What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2808=================================
2809
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002810*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002811
2812Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002813-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002814
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002815- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2816 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2817 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2818
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002819- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2820 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2821 (SF patch #664376.)
2822
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002823- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2824 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2825 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2826 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2827 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2828 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002829 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002830
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002831- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2832 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2833 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2834 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002835 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002836
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002837- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2838 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2839 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2840 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2841 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2842 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2843 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2844 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2845 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2846 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2847 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2848
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002849- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2850 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2851 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2852 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2853 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2854 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2855
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002856- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2857 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2858
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002859- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2860 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2861 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2862 case.)
2863
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002864- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2865 passed as unicode strings.
2866
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002867- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2868 See SF bug #683467.
2869
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002870- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2871 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2872
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002873- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2874
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002875- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2876
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002877- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2878 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2879 arguments.
2880
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002881- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2882 See SF bug #667147.
2883
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002884- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002885 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002886 See SF bug #676155.
2887
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002888- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002889 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002890 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2891 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2892 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2893 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2894 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2895 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002896
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002897Extension modules
2898-----------------
2899
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002900- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2901 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2902 tp_as_number pointer.
2903
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002904- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2905 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2906 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2907 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2908 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2909
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002910- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2911
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002912- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2913
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002914- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002915 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002916 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2917 patch #678531.)
2918
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002919- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2920 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2921
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002922- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2923 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2924
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002925- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2926
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002927- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2928 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2929 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2930
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002931- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2932
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002933- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2934 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2935
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002936- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002937
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002938- datetime changes:
2939
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002940 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2941
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002942 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2943 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2944 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2945 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2946 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2947 now.
2948
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002949 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002950 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2951 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002952
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002953 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002954 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002955 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2956 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2957 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2958 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002959
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002960 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2961 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2962 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002963 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2964
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002965 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2966 by a later example coded by Guido.
2967
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002968 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002969 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2970 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2971 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002972 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2973 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2974
2975 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2976 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2977 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2978 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2979 tzinfo subclass instance.
2980
2981 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2982 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2983 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2984 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2985 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2986 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2987 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2988 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002989
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002990 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2991 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2992 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2993 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2994 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002995 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2996
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002997 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002998
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002999 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3000 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3001 as a naive datetime object.
3002
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003003 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3004 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3005 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3006
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003007 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3008 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3009 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3010 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3011 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3012 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3013 comparison.
3014
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003015 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3016 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3017 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3018 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003019 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003020
3021 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003022
3023 and ::
3024
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003025 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3026
3027 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3028 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3029 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3030 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3031
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003032 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3033 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3034 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3035 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3036 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3037
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003038 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3039 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003040 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3041 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003042
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003043Library
3044-------
3045
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003046- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3047 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3048
3049- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3050 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3051 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3052 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3053 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3054 See PEP 307 for details.
3055
3056- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3057 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3058
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003059- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3060 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003061 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003062 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3063 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003064 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003065
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003066- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3067 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3068
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003069- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3070 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3071 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3072
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003073- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3074
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003075- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3076 exception.
3077
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003078- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3079 class.
3080
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003081- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3082 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3083 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3084
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003085- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3086 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3087
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003088- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003089 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3090 See SF bug #659228.
3091
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003092- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3093 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3094 See SF patch #651082.
3095
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003096- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003097
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003098- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3099 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3100
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003101- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003102 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003103
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003104- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3105 DOS paths from other platforms.
3106
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003107Tools/Demos
3108-----------
3109
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003110- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3111 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3112 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3113 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3114 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3115 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3116 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3117 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3118 example:
3119
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003120 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3121 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003122
3123 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3124
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003125
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003126Build
3127-----
3128
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003129- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3130 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3131 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003132 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3133
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003134 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3135
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003136- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3137 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3138 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3139 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3140 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3141 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3142 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3143 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3144 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3145
3146- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3147 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3148 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3149 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3150
3151- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3152 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3153
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003154C API
3155-----
3156
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003157- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3158 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003159
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003160- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3161 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3162 tp_as_number pointer.
3163
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003164- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3165 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3166 (SF #681367)
3167
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003168- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3169 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3170 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3171 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003172
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003173Tests
3174-----
3175
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003176- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003177 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3178 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3179 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3180 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3181 pydoc.)
3182
3183- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3184
3185- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003186
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003187Windows
3188-------
3189
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003190- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3191 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3192 time).
3193
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003194- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3195 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3196
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003197- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3198 release without strong cryptography.
3199
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003200- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003201 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003202
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003203- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3204 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3205
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003206Mac
3207---
3208
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003209- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3210 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003211
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003212- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3213 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3214 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003215
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003216- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3217 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003218
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003219- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3220 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3221 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3222 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003223
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003224- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003225 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3226 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3227 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003228
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003229
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003230What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003231=================================
3232
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003233*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003234
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003235Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003236--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003237
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003238- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3239
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003240- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3241 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003242 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003243 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003244 a different meaning than before.
3245
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003246- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003247 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003248 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003249
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003250- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003251 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003252 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003253
3254- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3255 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3256 and deallocation.
3257
3258- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3259 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3260
3261- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3262 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3263 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3264 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3265 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3266
3267- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3268 now detected by the garbage collector.
3269
3270- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3271 [SF bug 519621]
3272
3273- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3274 identifier.
3275
3276- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3277 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3278 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3279 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3280 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3281 [SF bug 563060]
3282
3283- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3284 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3285 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3286 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3287 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3288
3289- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3290 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3291 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3292
3293- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3294
3295- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3296 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3297 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3298 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3299 state of the slots would be lost.)
3300
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003301Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003302-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003303
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003304- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003305 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3306 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3307 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3308 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003309 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3310 Jython 2.1.
3311
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003312- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003313 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003314 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3315 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3316 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3317 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3318 these, see PEP 302.
3319
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003320- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3321 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3322 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3323
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003324- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3325 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3326 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3327
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003328- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3329 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3330 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3331
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003332- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3333 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3334 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3335 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3336 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3337 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3338 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3339 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3340 releases or implementations.
3341
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003342- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003343 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3344 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003345
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003346- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3347 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3348
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003349- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3350 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3351 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3352
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003353- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3354 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3355
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003356- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3357 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003358 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3359 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003360
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003361- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3362 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3363 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3364 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3365 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3366
3367 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3368 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3369 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3370 pattern.
3371
3372 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3373 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3374 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3375 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3376
3377 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3378 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3379 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3380 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3381 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3382 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3383
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003384- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3385 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3386 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3387 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3388 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3389 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3390 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3391 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003392
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003393- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3394 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3395 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3396 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3397 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003398 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3399 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3400 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3401 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3402 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3403 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3404 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003405
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003406- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3407 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3408
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003409- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3410 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3411 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3412 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3413 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3414 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3415 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3416 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3417 to Zack Weinberg!
3418
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003419- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3420 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3421 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3422 type. This has been fixed now.
3423
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003424- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3425 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3426 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3427
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003428- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3429 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3430 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3431 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3432 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3433 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3434 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3435 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003436 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003437
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003438- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3439 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3440 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003441
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003442- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3443 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3444 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3445 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3446 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3447 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3448 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3449 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003450 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003451 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3452 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3453
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003454- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3455 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3456 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3457 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3458 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3459 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3460 this.)
3461
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003462- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3463 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003464 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003465 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003466 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3467 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003468 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3469 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003470
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003471- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3472 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3473 currently running.
3474
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003475- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3476 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3477 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3478 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3479
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003480- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3481 as directory names.
3482
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003483- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3484 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3485
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003486- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3487 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3488
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003489- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003490 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3491 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003492
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003493- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3494 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3495 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3496 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3497 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3498
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003499- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3500 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3501 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3502 removed.
3503
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003504- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3505 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3506 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3507
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003508- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3509 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3510 to __debug__.
3511
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003512- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3513 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3514 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3515
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003516- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3517 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3518 deprecated now.
3519
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003520- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3521 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3522 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003523
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003524- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3525 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3526 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3527 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3528 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003529
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003530- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3531 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3532
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003533- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3534 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3535 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003536 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003537 is backward compatible.
3538
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003539- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3540 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3541 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3542 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3543 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3544
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003545- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3546 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3547 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3548 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3549 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3550 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003551
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003552- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3553 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3554
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003555- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3556 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3557
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003558- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3559 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3560 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3561 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3562 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3563
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003564- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3565 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3566 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3567
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003568- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003569 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3570
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003571- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3572 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3573 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003574
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003575- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3576 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3577
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003578- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3579 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3580 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3581
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003582- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3583
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003584Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003585-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003586
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003587- Added three operators to the operator module:
3588 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3589 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3590 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3591
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003592- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3593
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003594- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3595 archives.
3596
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003597- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3598 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3599 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3600
3601 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3602
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003603- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3604 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3605 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003606 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003607
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003608- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3609 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3610 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3611 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003612 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3613 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3614 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3615 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003616
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003617- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3618 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003619
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003620- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3621
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003622- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3623 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3624
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003625- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3626 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3627 supported.
3628
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003629- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3630
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003631- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3632 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003633
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003634- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3635 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3636
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003637- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3638
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003639- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3640 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3641
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003642- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3643 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3644 functions but callable type objects.
3645
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003646- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003647 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003648 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003649
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003650- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3651 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003652
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003653- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3654 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003655
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003656- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3657 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3658 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3659 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3660
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003661- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3662 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003663
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003664- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3665 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3666 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3667 and __imul__.
3668
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003669- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003670 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3671 is called.
3672
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003673- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3674 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3675 interpreter was compiled.
3676
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003677- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3678 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3679 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003680 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003681 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3682 1, not 2.
3683
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003684- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3685 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3686 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3687 limit.
3688
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003689- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3690 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3691 bug #623464.
3692
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003693- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3694 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3695 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3696 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3697
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003698Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003699-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003700
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003701- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3702
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003703- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3704 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3705 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3706 with Python 2.3a2.
3707
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003708- os.path exposes getctime.
3709
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003710- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003711 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003712 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003713 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003714 unit tests of floating point results.
3715
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003716- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3717 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3718 has been increased.
3719
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003720- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3721 executed.
3722
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003723- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3724 postinstallation script.
3725
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003726- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3727 test the current module.
3728
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003729- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003730 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3731 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3732 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3733 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3734
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003735- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003736 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003737 Ward's Optik package.
3738
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003739- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3740 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3741 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3742 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3743
3744- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3745 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003746 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003747
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003748- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3749 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3750 shelf are binary pickles.
3751
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003752- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3753 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3754
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003755- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3756 modules are iterators now.
3757
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003758- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3759 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3760 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3761 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3762 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3763 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003764
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003765- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3766 with their entity value.
3767
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003768- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3769
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003770- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3771 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003772
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003773- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3774 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003775 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003776
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003777- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3778 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3779 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3780 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3781 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3782 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3783 main():
3784
3785 import locale
3786 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3787
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003788- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3789 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3790
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003791- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3792 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3793 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3794 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3795 to the new standard.
3796
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003797- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3798 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3799 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3800 an extension to the database.
3801
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003802- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3803 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3804 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3805 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003806 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003807
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003808- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003809 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003810
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003811- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3812 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3813 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3814 bounded integers.
3815
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003816- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3817 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3818 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3819 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3820 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3821 in existence.
3822
3823 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3824 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3825 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3826 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3827 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3828 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3829
3830 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3831 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3832 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3833 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3834
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003835- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3836 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3837 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3838
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003839- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3840
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003841- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3842 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3843 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3844 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3845
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003846- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3847 argument.
3848
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003849- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3850 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3851 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3852 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3853 [SF patch 560794].
3854
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003855- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3856 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3857 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003858 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3859 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3860 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003861
3862- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3863 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003864
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003865- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3866 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3867 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3868 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003869
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003870- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3871 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3872 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3873 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3874 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3875
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003876- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003877
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003878- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3879
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003880- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3881 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3882 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3883 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3884 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3885 identical to None.
3886
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003887- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3888 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3889 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3890 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3891 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3892 results now.
3893
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003894- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3895 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3896
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003897- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3898 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3899 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3900 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3901 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3902 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3903 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3904 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3905
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003906- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3907
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003908- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3909 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3910
3911- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3912 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3913 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3914 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3915 and other systems.
3916
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003917- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3918 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3919 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3920 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 +00003921 work well with these.
3922
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003923- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3924
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003925- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003926 connections.
3927
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003928- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3929 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3930 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3931
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003932- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3933 sets
3934
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003935- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3936 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3937 name.
3938
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003939- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3940 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3941 passed in.
3942
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003943- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003944 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003945 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3946 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003947
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003948- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3949
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003950- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3951
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003952- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3953 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3954 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3955
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003956- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3957 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3958 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3959 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003960 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003961
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003962- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003963 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003964 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003965
3966- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3967 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3968 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3969
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003970- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003971 the value of its expression argument.
3972
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003973- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3974 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3975 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3976
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003977- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3978 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3979 skipstone browser was included.
3980
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003981- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3982 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3983
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003984Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003985-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003986
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003987- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3988 names in addition to accepting file names.
3989
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003990- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3991 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3992 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3993 still used and useful.)
3994
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003995- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3996 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3997 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3998 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003999
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004000- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4001 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4002 the generated binary.
4003
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004004Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004005-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004006
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004007- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4008
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004009- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4010 except in the hands of experts.
4011
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004012- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004013 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4014 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4015 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004016
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004017- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4018 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4019 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4020 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4021 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4022 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4023 builds.
4024
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004025- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4026 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4027 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4028 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4029 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4030 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4031 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4032 new type.
4033
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004034- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004035
4036 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4037 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4038 positive infinities.
4039
4040 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4041 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4042 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4043 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4044 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4045 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4046 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4047
4048 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4049
4050 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4051
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004052- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4053 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4054 size of the executable.
4055
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004056- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4057 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4058 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4059 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004060
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004061- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4062
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004063- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4064 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4065 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004066
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004067- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4068 well as Unix.
4069
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004070- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4071 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4072 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4073 modules in the README file for details.
4074
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004075C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004076-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004077
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004078- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4079 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004080 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004081 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004082 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004083
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004084- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4085 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4086 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4087 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4088 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4089 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004090 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004091 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4092 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4093 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4094 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4095 aligned.)
4096
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004097- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4098 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4099 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4100
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004101- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4102 level.
4103
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004104- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4105 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4106 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4107 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4108 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4109
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004110- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4111 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4112 code.
4113
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004114- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4115 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4116 adjusting for negative indices.
4117
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004118- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4119 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4120 object.
4121
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004122- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4123 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4124 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4125
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004126- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4127 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004128
4129- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4130
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004131- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4132 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4133 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4134 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4135
4136- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4137
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004138- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004139
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004140- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004141 without going through the buffer API.
4142
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004143- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004144
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004145- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4146 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4147 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4148 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4149
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004150- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4151 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4152
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004153- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004154 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4155
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004156New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004157-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004158
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004159- OpenVMS is now supported.
4160
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004161- AtheOS is now supported.
4162
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004163- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4164
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004165- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4166
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004167Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004168-----
4169
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004170- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4171 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4172 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004173
4174Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004175-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004176
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004177- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4178 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4179 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4180 bugs.
4181 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004182 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004183 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4184 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004185 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004186
4187- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004188 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004189
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004190- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4191 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4192
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004193- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4194 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004195 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004196 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4197
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004198- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4199 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4200 use files" uninstall option).
4201
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004202- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4203
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004204- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4205 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4206
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004207- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4208 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4209 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4210
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004211- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4212 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4213 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4214 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4215 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004216 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4217 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4218 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004219
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004220- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004221 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004222 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4223 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4224 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4225 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4226 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4227 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4228 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4229 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4230 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4231 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4232 work around.
4233
4234- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4235 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4236 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4237 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4238 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4239 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4240 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4241 specified with O_CREAT too).
4242
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004243Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004244----
4245
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004246- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004247
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004248- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4249 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4250 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4251
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004252- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4253 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4254 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4255
4256- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4257 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4258 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4259 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4260 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4261 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4262 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4263 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004264
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004265- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4266 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4267 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004268
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004269- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4270 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4271 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4272 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4273 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004274
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004275- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4276 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4277 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004278
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004279- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4280 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004281
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004282- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4283 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4284 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4285 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4286 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004287
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004288- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4289 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4290 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4291
4292- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4293 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4294 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004295
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004296- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4297 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4298 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4299 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004300 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004301
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004302- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4303 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004304
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004305- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4306 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004307
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004308- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004309 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004310 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4311 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004312
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004313
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004314What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004315===============================
4316
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004317*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4318
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004319Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004320--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004321
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004322- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4323 with a custom metaclass.
4324
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004325Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004326-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004327
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004328- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4329 are proxies.
4330
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004331Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004332-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004333
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004334- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4335 very short strings.
4336
4337- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4338 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4339 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4340 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4341 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4342
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004343Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004344-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004345
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004346- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4347 close or delete time).
4348
4349- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4350 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4351
4352- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4353
4354- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004355 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004356
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004357Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004358-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004359
4360Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004361-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004362
4363C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004364-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004365
4366New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004367-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004368
4369Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004370-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004371
4372Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004373-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004374
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004375- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4376
4377- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4378 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4379
4380- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4381 deleted at process exit time.
4382
4383- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4384 in backslash.
4385
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004386Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004387----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004388
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004389- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4390 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4391 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4392
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004393
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004394What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004395===========================
4396
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004397*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4398
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004399Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004400--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004401
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004402- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4403 been extensively updated. See
4404
4405 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4406
4407 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4408
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004409- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4410 deleted!
4411
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004412- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4413 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4414 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4415 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4416 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4417
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004418- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4419
4420 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4421 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4422
4423 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4424 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4425 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4426 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4427 supported anyway.
4428
4429 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4430 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4431
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004432- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4433 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4434 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4435 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4436 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004437
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004438- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4439 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4440 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4441
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004442Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004443-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004444
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004445- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4446 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4447 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4448 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4449 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4450 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004451 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4452 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4453 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4454 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004455
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004456- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4457 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4458 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4459
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004460Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004461-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004462
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004463- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4464
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004465Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004466-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004467
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004468- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4469 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4470 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4471 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4472 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4473 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4474
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004475- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4476
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004477- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4478
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004479- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4480
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004481- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4482 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4483 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4484
4485- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4486
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004487Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004488-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004489
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004490- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4491 off a search on Google.
4492
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004493Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004494-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004495
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004496- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4497 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4498 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4499 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4500 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4501 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4502 other platforms should do likewise.
4503
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004504- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4505 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4506 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4507
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004508C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004509-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004510
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004511- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4512 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4513 producing key-value pairs.
4514
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004515- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004516 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004517 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4518 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4519 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4520 previously went unchallenged.
4521
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004522New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004523-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004524
4525Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004526-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004527
4528Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004529-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004530
4531Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004532----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004533
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004534- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4535 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004536
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004537- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4538 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4539 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4540 home.
4541
4542
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004543What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004544===========================
4545
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004546*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4547
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004548Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004549--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004550
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004551- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4552 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004553
4554 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004555 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004556
4557 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4558 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004559 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004560 This needs to be documented.
4561
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004562- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4563 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4564
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004565- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4566 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4567 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4568
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004569- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4570 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4571
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004572- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4573 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4574 class forbids it).
4575
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004576- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4577 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4578 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4579
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004580- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4581
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004582Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004583-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004584
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004585- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4586 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004587 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004588
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004589- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4590 (like 1 + '').
4591
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004592Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004593-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004594
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004595- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4596 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4597 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4598 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004599 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004600 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4601
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004602- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4603 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4604 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4605 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4606
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004607- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4608 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004609 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4610 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4611 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004612
4613- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4614 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004615
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004616- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4617 bytes on its input.
4618
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004619Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004620-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004621
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004622- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004623 convenience function.
4624
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004625- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4626 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4627 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004628 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4629 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4630 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4631 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4632 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4633 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004634
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004635- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4636 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4637 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4638 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4639
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004640- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4641 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4642 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4643
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004644- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4645 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4646 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4647 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4648
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004649- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4650 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004652 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4653 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4654 new -l and -e options.
4655
4656- statcache is now deprecated.
4657
4658- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4659 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004660 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004661 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4662 time properly taken into account.
4663
4664- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4665 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4666 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4667 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4668
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004669Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004670-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004671
4672Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004673-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004674
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004675- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4676 is built with libdb3 if available.
4677
4678- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4679
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004680C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004681-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004682
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004683- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4684 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4685 PySequence_Size().
4686
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004687- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4688
4689- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4690 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4691 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4692
4693- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4694 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4695
4696- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4697 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4698
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004699New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004700-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004701
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004702- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4703 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4704
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004705- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4706 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4707
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004708- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4709
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004710Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004711-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004712
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004713- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4714 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4715
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004716Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004717-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004718
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004719Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004720----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004721
4722- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4723 removed completely in the next release.
4724
4725- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4726 OSX.
4727
4728- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4729 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4730
4731- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4732
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004733
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004734What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004735===========================
4736
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004737*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4738
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004739Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004740--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004741
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004742- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004743 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004744 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004745 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4746 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004747 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4748 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004749 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4750 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004751
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004752- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4753 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4754
4755- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4756 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4757
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004758Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004759-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004760
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004761- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4762 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4763 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4764 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4765 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4766 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4767 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4768 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4769
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004770- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4771 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4772 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4773 example).
4774
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004775- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004776 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004777 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004778 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004779
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004780- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4781 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4782 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004783 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004784
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004785- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4786 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4787 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4788 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4789 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4790 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4791
4792 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4793
4794 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4795
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004796Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004797-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004798
4799- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4800
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004801- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4802
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004803- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4804 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004805
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004806- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4807 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4808 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4809 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4810 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4811 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004812 attributes.
4813
4814- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4815 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4816 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004817
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004818- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4819 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4820 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004821
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004822- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4823 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4824 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004825 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4826 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4827
4828- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4829 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004830
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004831Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004832-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004833
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004834- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4835 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4836
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004837- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4838 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4839 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4840 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4841
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004842- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4843 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4844 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4845 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4846
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004847 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4848 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4849 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4850 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4851 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4852 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4853 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4854 without losing information).
4855
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004856- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004857 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4858 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4859 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4860 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4861 module).
4862
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004863 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004864 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4865 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4866 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4867 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004868
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004869- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004870 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4871 encoding.
4872
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004873- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4874 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4875
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004876- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004877 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4878
4879- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4880 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4881 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4882 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4883
4884- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4885
4886- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4887 ON, and OFF.
4888
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004889- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4890 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4891
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004892Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004893-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004894
4895- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4896 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4897 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004898
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004899- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4900 been added: -X and -E.
4901
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004902Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004903-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004904
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004905- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4906 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4907
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004908C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004909-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004910
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004911- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4912 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4913 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4914 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4915 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4916
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004917- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4918 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4919 as long) arguments.
4920
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004921- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4922 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4923 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4924 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4925 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4926 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4927
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004928- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4929 input.
4930
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004931New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004932-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004933
4934Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004935-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004936
4937Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004938-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004939
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004940- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4941 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4942 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4943
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004944- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4945 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4946 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004947 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004948
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004949 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4950 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4951 import signal
4952 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004953
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004954 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004955 while 1:
4956 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004957 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004958 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4959 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4960 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4961 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004962
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004963
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004964What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4965===========================
4966
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004967*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4968
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004969Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004970--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004971
4972- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4973 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4974 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4975
4976- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4977 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4978 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4979 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4980 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4981 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4982 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004983
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004984- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004985 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004986 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4987 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4988 associate a docstring with a property.
4989
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004990- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4991 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4992 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4993 other built-in object types.
4994
4995- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4996 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4997 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4998 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4999 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5000
5001- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5002 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5003
5004- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5005 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005006 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005007 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5008 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5009 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5010 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5011 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5012
5013- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5014 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5015 class.
5016
5017- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5018 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5019 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5020 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5021
5022- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5023 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5024 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5025 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5026
5027- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5028 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5029
5030- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5031 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5032 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5033 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5034 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005035 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005036 with the same value as s.
5037
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005038- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5039
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005040Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005041----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005042
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005043- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5044
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005045- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5046 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5047 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5048 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5049 objects.
5050
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005051- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5052 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005053 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5054 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5055
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005056- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5057 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5058 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5059
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005060Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005061-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005062
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005063- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5064 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5065 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5066 by the instances.
5067
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005068- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5069 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5070 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5071
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005072- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5073 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5074 before the entire comparison is complete.
5075
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005076- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5077 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5078 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5079
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005080- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5081 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5082 getwriter().
5083
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005084- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5085 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5086
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005087- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005088 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5089 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5090
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005091- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5092 iterable object.
5093
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005094- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5095 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005096
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005097- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5098 authentication.
5099
5100- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5101 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005102
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005103- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005104 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5105 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5106 a sample driver.)
5107
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005108Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005109-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005110
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005111- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5112 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5113 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5114 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5115 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5116 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5117 kernel has large file support.
5118
5119- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5120 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5121 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5122 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5123 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5124
5125- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5126 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5127 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5128
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005129C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005130-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005131
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005132- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5133 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5134
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005135New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005136-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005137
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005138- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5139 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5140
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005141Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005142-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005143
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005144- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5145 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5146 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5147 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5148 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5149
5150- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5151 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5152 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5153 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5154
5155- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5156 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5157
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005158Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005159-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005160
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005161- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005162 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5163 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005164
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005165
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005166What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5167===========================
5168
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005169*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5170
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005171Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005172----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005173
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005174- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5175 big to represent as a C double.
5176
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005177- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5178 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5179 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5180 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5181 restriction).
5182
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005183- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5184 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5185 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5186 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5187 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5188
5189 >>> dir([])
5190 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5191 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5192 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5193 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5194 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5195 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5196 'reverse', 'sort']
5197
5198 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5199
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005200- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005201 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5202 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5203 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5204 OverflowError exception.
5205
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005206- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005207 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005208 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5209 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5210 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5211 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5212 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005213 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005214 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5215 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5216
5217 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5218 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5219 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5220 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005221
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005222- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005223 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5224 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5225 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5226 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5227 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5228 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5229 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5230 once it is created.
5231
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005232- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5233 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5234 (key, value) pairs.
5235
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005236- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005237 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5238 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5239
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005240- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5241 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5242 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5243 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5244 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005245
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005246- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005247 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5248 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5249
5250 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5251
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005252- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005253 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5254
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005255Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005256-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005257
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005258- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005259 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5260 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005261
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005262- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5263 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5264 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5265 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5266 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5267 in this area anymore).
5268
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005269- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5270 threading.Timer.
5271
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005272- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5273 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5274
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005275- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005276 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5277
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005278- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005279 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5280 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5281 converted to Python longs.
5282
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005283- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005284 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5285
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005286- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5287 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5288 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5289
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005290Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005291-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005292
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005293- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5294 division operators as per PEP 238.
5295
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005296Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005297-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005298
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005299- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5300 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5301 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5302 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5303
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005304C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005305-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005306
5307- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005308
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005309- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5310 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005311 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005312
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005313 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5314 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005315 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005316 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005317
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005318- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005319 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5320 module:
5321
5322 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005323
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005324 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5325 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005326
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005327 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5328 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005329
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005330 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5331
5332 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5333
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005334- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005335 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5336 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5337 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005338
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005339New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005340-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005341
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005342- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5343 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5344 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5345 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5346 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005347
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005348Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005349-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005350
5351Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005352-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005353
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005354- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5355 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5356 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5357 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005358 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5359 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5360 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5361 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5362 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005363
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005364- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005365 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5366
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005367
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005368What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5369===========================
5370
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005371*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5372
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005373Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005374-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005375
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005376- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5377 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5378
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005379- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5380 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5381 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005382
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005383- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5384 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5385 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5386 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005387
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005388- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5389
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005390- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005391
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005392Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005393-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005394
5395- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005396 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005397 the module docstring for details.
5398
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005399Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005400-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005401
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005402- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005403 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5404 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5405 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005406
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005407- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5408 Nick Mathewson.
5409
5410Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005411----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005412
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005413- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5414 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5415 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5416 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5417 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5418 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5419 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5420 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5421
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005422- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5423 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5424 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5425 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5426
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005427- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5428 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5429 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5430 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5431 come a long way).
5432
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005433- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5434 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5435 write filters for these warnings).
5436
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005437- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5438 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5439 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5440 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5441 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5442
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005443- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5444 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5445 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5446 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5447 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5448 older distribution.
5449
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005450Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005451-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005452
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005453- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5454 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005455 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005456
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005457- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5458 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5459 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5460
5461- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5462
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005463- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5464
5465- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5466
5467- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5468
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005469- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005470
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005471- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5472
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005473New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005474-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005475
5476C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005477-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005478
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005479- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5480 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5481 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5482 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5483 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5484 against buffer overruns.
5485
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005486- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005487 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5488 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005489 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5490 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5491 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5492
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005493- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5494 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5495 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5496 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5497 deprecated.
5498
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005499Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005500-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005501
5502- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5503 relevant is found.
5504
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005505
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005506What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005507===========================
5508
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005509*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5510
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005511Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005512----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005513
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005514- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5515 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5516 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5517 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5518 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5519 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5520 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5521 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005522 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005523 repaired.
5524
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005525- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005526 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005527 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5528 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5529 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5530 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5531 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5532 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5533 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5534 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5535
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005536- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5537 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5538 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5539 leading BMO character).
5540
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005541- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5542 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5543 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5544
5545 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5546 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5547 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005548
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005549 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5550 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5551 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5552 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5553 for various simple to use conversions.
5554
5555 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5556 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5557
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005558 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5559 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5560 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5561 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5562 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5563 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5564 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5565 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5566 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5567 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5568 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5569 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5570 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5571 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5572 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005573
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005574- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5575 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5576 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005577 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005578 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005579
5580 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005581 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5582 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5583 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5584 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5585 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005586 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5587 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005588
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005589 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5590 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5591 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005592 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005593
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005594- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5595 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5596 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5597 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5598 floating arithmetic,
5599
5600 x = 9007199254740992.0
5601 print long(x)
5602
5603 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5604 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5605 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5606 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5607 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5608 functions are of good quality).
5609
5610 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5611 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5612 algorithms to break.
5613
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005614- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5615 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5616 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5617 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5618 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5619 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5620 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5621 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5622 order.
5623
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005624- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5625 operation along the most common code paths.
5626
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005627- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5628 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5629
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005630- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5631 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5632 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5633 {}.update(UserDict())
5634
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005635- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5636 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5637 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5638 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5639 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5640 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5641 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5642 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5643
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005644- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005645 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005646
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005647 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005648 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5649 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005650 join() method of strings
5651 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005652 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5653 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005654 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005655 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005656
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005657- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5658 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5659
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005660- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5661 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5662
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005663- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5664 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5665 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5666 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5667
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005668- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5669 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005670 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005671 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5672 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005673
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005674- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5675
5676
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005677Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005678-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005679
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005680- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005681 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005682 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5683 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5684
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005685- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5686 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5687
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005688- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5689 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5690 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5691 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5692
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005693- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5694 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5695 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5696
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005697- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5698
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005699- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5700
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005701- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5702 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5703 that are still imported into string.py).
5704
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005705- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5706
5707- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5708 Now it does.
5709
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005710- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5711
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005712- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5713 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5714 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5715 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5716 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005717 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5718 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005719
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005720- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5721 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5722 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5723 'help(object)'.
5724
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005725Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005726-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005727
5728- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005729 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005730 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5731 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5732
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005733- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005734 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5735 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005736
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005737C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005738-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005739
5740- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5741 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005742
5743----
5744
5745**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**